“... context needs the expanded sense it doesn’t always have in English. Barthes is a moralist, as John Sturrock says in Structuralism and Since, because ‘moral passions and distinctions excite him,’ and his apparent flightiness is often a form of scruple, a refusal to lay down a badgering law. Sometimes it is just flightiness. Elements of Semiology both ...”

“... come and gone like shadows – Jim, the soccer star, had vanished, And Joe, the pensive one, and John, of calculus the gloomy hero … She flirted and procrastinated, toyed superficially with love, but in her heart awaited more. 16 Inevitably comes the day; He’s leaving, the ethereal friend: the bill is paid, exams are done with, the tennis racket in its ...”

“... compellingly ghastly ‘Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way’, a sort of homage to John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse (1968) only denser and even more postmodernly whorled: ‘For whom is the Funhouse a house? … For Tom Sternberg, the Funhouse is less a place of fear and confusion than (grimace) an idea, an ever-distant telos his arrival at ...”

“... modern saints for modern times – her companions were Thérèse of Lisieux, the Curé d’Ars and John Bosco – in order to recapture the faithful. In those proceedings, the Church did not admit fault as it does now. Rivette’s film draws on the rehabilitation trial far more deeply than those of his predecessors, for whom Joan’s persecution in Rouen and ...”

“... Paterson, New York Herald Tribune); ‘flair for imagery … excellent passages’ (John McClure, New Orleans Times-Picayune) – but didn’t think it amounted to much: ‘neither profound nor durable’ (Paterson); ‘not convincing as a whole … half-baked’ (McClure). Many said the book proved Fitzgerald was growing as a writer, but few ...”

“... of sporting successes, he said the explanation was simple. Money: the lottery money introduced by John Major in 1994. But the national lottery wasn’t the ECB’s only source of money. Sky began broadcasting cricket in 1990, but in 2006, on the back of England’s Ashes success, it acquired exclusive rights to all of England’s home matches. Since ...”

“... War, because strong language – like strong drink – is a way to alleviate despair. In 1930, John Brophy and Eric Partridge published a collection of British songs and slang from the war. They claimed that soldiers used the word ‘fucking’ so often that it was merely a warning ‘that a noun is coming’. In a normal situation, swear words are used ...”

“... CIA by several orders of magnitude. Poring through these files in 1994 was a friend of Morley’s, John Newman, who was completing a book called Oswald and the CIA, published in 1995. Among the new files Newman spotted some routing slips from the CI Staff which recorded the arrival of documents circulated by the FBI, the National Security Agency and a dozen ...”

“... marriageable age in the whole first generation of the Plymouth Colony’, and the ship’s cooper, John Alden, whom she chose over the colony’s military supremo, Commander Myles Standish – an episode that became the subject of a poem by Longfellow. The maternal line included heroes of the War of Independence and cousins who fought on opposing sides in the ...”

“... own budgets and therefore take responsibility for the services they offer. The health minister, John Reid, recently stated that he would no longer answer questions about operational matters at foundation hospitals because the point of such hospitals is that they must answer for themselves. PFI, foundation hospitals, private-sector competition are all part ...”

“... such as Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, as well as theoreticians like Steven Walt and John Mearsheimer, even claimed that a genuine consideration of US interests militated against the war. The mere fact that some politicians misused or abused the principle of national security need not call that principle into question. But when an idea routinely ...”

“... swoln membrane from their plumeless throat/Pendant’. In a hostile but clever review of Madoc, John Ferriar puzzled about its genre: ‘We suppose that Mr Southey would not suffer it to be classed under the mock-heroic.’ The epics are not mock, of course, in the way that The Splendid Shilling or even Mac Flecknoe is, but perhaps it isn’t so absurd to ...”

“... called the ‘hermeneutical Mafia’.) Even the literary texts they take here – various works by John Ashbery, Shelley, Wordsworth and Maurice Blanchot – get so thoroughly devoured that they lose any intrinsic interest they might have had for him (which isn’t much); and while he probably won’t understand most of the book if he does attempt to read ...”

“... is the closest thing we have to a national industry. King Charles is a private landlord. John Lewis is a private landlord. The homelessness charity St Mungo’s is a private landlord. So are many MPs and, as Ruby found out, doctors.Landlordism has proliferated in tandem with soaring land and property values. A fifth of British homes are currently ...”

“... of Linear Elamite. Afterwards, the keeper of the Middle East department at the British Museum, John Curtis, mentioned that he knew the Mahboubian family and could make an introduction. It took four years of cajoling but eventually the family agreed to withdraw the silver vessels from a safe deposit box for Desset to examine.Desset is adamant that without ...”