“... you are – pounces on the present company and scratches the absent’.Howard wrote three novels: Tim, a schoolboy romance; All That Was Possible, an epistolary account of an extramarital affair; and Belchamber, about a fatally passive aristocrat called Sainty. Sturgis does little to explain the virtues of these books, or why Belchamber has retained a status ...”

“... to this notion. He is familiar with ‘a related theory from editing – often, the problem on page 172 is not a problem on page 172 but something that needs fixing on page 46 and the issue on the later page is no longer a problem.’ This tends to ...”

“... Reviewers are always sternly instructed to check page proofs against finished copies of books, and I do, I will. But the proofs of Anthony Powell’s A Writer’s Notebook provide, along with numerous unimportant oddities of phrase and spelling which seem to be errors of transcription from script to voice to type to print (‘I would like to thank my wife, who read the manuscript book onto tape, and also Helen Gould, who typed it’), one lovely new alignment which ought not to be allowed simply to vanish into its own correction ...”

“... there’s a lot to be said for more nuanced and traditional ways of conveying ambivalence on the page. Transgression works to clear a space, as for instance Philip Roth’s gleeful repudiation of sexual respectability in and after Portnoy’s Complaint freed him to sift through his inheritance, literary and cultural, and to keep only what he wanted. Misogyny ...”

“... world that surrounded her. Now, in December 1991, the woman, Hilda Kietel, made her second front-page appearance in the neighbourhood fright-sheet. She was found lying naked, except for a shawl tugged about her shoulders, under a kitchen table. She had been there for about a month. An inspection of the premises revealed no carpet, no linoleum, no cooker, no ...”

“... parallel English translations. O’Brien is more Anglocentric: Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill is in facing-page English, but Sorley MacLean and Iain Crichton Smith, for example, occur only in English, and there is no Welsh-language poetry at all. On the other hand, O’Brien’s selection of English-language poetry casts a wider and more ambitious net. ‘Even as we ...”

“... speak as best they can across nebulous cultural boundaries, and not lie mute and moribund on the page.’ For Gansel the work is pastoral: Translation as Transhumance refers to the nomadic shepherd’s practice of moving flocks between summer and winter pastures and encloses the ideas of the human and of the earth (humus). ‘So it is with the transhumance ...”

“... cigarette and skull like a troubled Hamlet to Vivienne Westwood’s fairy godmother, both shot by Tim Walker. From this side of the gallery the rooms lead onto the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s as well as a small lightbox room with dayglo scenes by Nick Knight, but one really needs to go all the way in the opposite direction, through the 1980s and some unlikely ...”

“... to Quentin Oates), managed to contain itself for three weeks, until the fourth possible book-page Thursday. It did, however, break silence the previous Thursday by announcing the forthcoming treat. The delay enabled the reviewer to follow the author’s recommendation, broadcast to the nation on both TV and radio, that the book should be read ...”

“... is prompted to do by computer code that a webpage downloads to your browser when it accesses the page. As a programmer explained to me, ‘the code runs in the browser to gather as much information as it can and encodes that into the address of the image it requests.’ Whatever you look at on the site; whatever you buy; the things you add to a shopping cart ...”

“... not spoiling it for you – is made prime minister in the concluding sentence of a thrilling final page. Critics returned to this scene after the reporters of the News of the World showed that journalists could indeed be a bunch of shits, by setting up and bugging conversations between Archer and a prostitute. The passage was still being thrown back at him in ...”

“... But the work of the two groups has been by no means separate. Johanson’s chief collaborator, Tim White, was earlier engaged with Mary Leakey on excavation of footprints made by still earlier hominids 3.75 million years ago at Laetoli in Tanzania. Differences arose, however, especially over the interpretation of the fossils from Afar. As so often ...”

“... kept quiet. At last, on 20 October 1994, the paper published the story that Fayed had paid the MPs Tim Smith and Neil Hamilton to campaign on his behalf in the House of Commons. Smith, a former Tory Party Treasurer, admitted the payments and promptly resigned as a junior Northern Ireland Minister. Hamilton denied everything to everyone. He told Michael ...”

“... to defeat rebels in 1995 (three years later a firm run by the man who later founded Aegis, Tim Spicer, was said to have flown 28 tonnes of weaponry to Sierra Leone, in breach of a UN embargo). The other was the alleged 2004 attempt by a group of South African mercenaries, led by the British ex-SAS officer Simon Mann, to overthrow the government of ...”

“... British state had not done a shred of preparation,’ May’s deputy, Damian Green, told Tim Shipman. ‘The whole machine went on a journey, and part of that journey was to discover problems that hadn’t been discussed at the time of the referendum.’ The EU, however, was prepared and laid out its timetable for up to two years of negotiations, to ...”