“... Labour council was forced to reduce its spending by £45.4 million and sacked 730 staff. In May 2019, the Conservatives won the local elections, taking power for the first time in forty years. In December, the new council trumpeted that it was setting its ‘most optimistic budget in a decade’ and planned no further ‘significant’ cuts till at ...”

“... which,Were it the fashion to wear no clothes,Would be as well-dressedAs any.There may be more eyewitness descriptions of Millay’s body than of any other poet writing in English: she was fond of skinny-dipping with friends and weeding in the nude. She lived by her own laws and can’t be neatly slotted into narratives of feminist triumphalism ...”

“... pronunciation or his mannerism would be cads, and they knew it.’Bottomley’s career ended in May 1922, with his prosecution for fraud. Key to his defeat was the defection of a group of admirers and associates, chief among them Reuben Bigland, a Birmingham printer. One difference between the two men was that Bottomley had escaped poverty by his late ...”

“... is not enough to acknowledge our complicity; we should participate in changing those processes.It may be that we owe it to these workers to abolish their work – making it visible isn’t enough. The first step is for workers to try to change their conditions, but for those in ‘dirty’ sectors, means of resistance are limited: filling in forms (tedious ...”

“... third sign represented a pair (SHESH in Coptic), you would have a pre-Greek cartouche which ‘we may venture to call … Remesses’. On the first, second and last points he was correct. If Young had more insistently observed that the third sign in the cartouche of Ramesses included the very same bent line – the fold of cloth – he had transliterated as ...”

“... during his years as a critic. This pattern, of bursts of activity alternating with long hiatuses, may have been due in part to depression. During the winter of 1886-87, he found new compositional momentum with settings of Goethe and Eichendorff, and in 1888, inspired by his first critical publications, composed the 53 settings of Eduard Mörike that make up ...”

“... of contact with the dead without ever promising anything as fantastical as reanimation.Coffins may not confer immortality, but for Seuss they do mark a place to dig, a hinged form to swing open. Sonnets are hinged too. If one defining feature of the sonnet is its brevity, another is the dramatic turn that often occurs within its fourteen lines – in the ...”

“... sexist swan, helping you to imagine yourself with a great, big bill beating above that girl. It may be that today’s escape route from fashion for male poets is into deprivation, for women into over-achievement and showing-off. Nonetheless, the poetry here is genuinely in the predicament, and seems the more genuine the more one reads it. Out of cavern ...”

“... the product of ‘a vulgar imagination largely indifferent to social accuracy’. ‘Carnovsky’ may be identified as Portnoy’s Complaint and other names given to Lonoff and Appel, but the point is that the effect on Roth’s fiction has been to turn him into a writer for whom the world external to himself hardly exists. It comes as no surprise, then, to ...”

“... of Communist leadership, Stalin and Dimitrov, Mao Zhe Dong and Ho Chi Minh, even Khrushchev, may have been politically corrupt in the abuse of power and their cynical acceptance of the cheapness of human life. But their personal life-style was modest, informed by a puritanical ethos. The rot finally set in with Brezhnev. Khrushchev could say, and even ...”

“... and those who advocated the decisive revolutionary stroke. It’s often forgotten (including, I may say, by Kagarlitsky) how much else apart from ‘gradualism’ was accepted by the gradualists. British, French and German official socialists reconciled themselves to the continuation of Empire, to the maintenance of a class system, and finally, to the ...”

“... herself has survived has made, as she insists, ‘not the least difference’. The conclusion may be a little too Hitchcockian for comfort, but Sheila Kohler’s book is more than a skilfully assembled amnesiac thriller. The narrator’s distancing tone could easily have been more offputting than it actually is. Although her recourse to negative ...”

“... and events, and the movement back and forwards in time so that matters dealt with in one volume may be elaborated in another, are handled with the organising skill once given to accountancy and literary agency. But although there is lots of technique, there is no style. The level of the writing is almost consistently commonplace, the dialogue rarely more ...”

“... clear that he wanted the job less than his mother wanted it for him; and in that, at least, he may have shown good judgment. Like so many royal biographies, this book is devoid of any real historical perspective. It is excessively informative and inadequately interpretative, and is written in the sort of coy and courtly language which the events of 1992 ...”

“... the excursion trains to the hanging a merciful ignorance of such imperatives prevailed. Some of us may doubt whether the Victorious, at any social level, took their etiquette books seriously. Such works may have been found in every middle-class home, but had they any higher standing than Joe Miller’s jest-book in an ...”