“... He is a man tempered by the heat of fire and brimstone; to him, Carmody is the devil incarnate. He may recognise that the devil is ‘a fallen child, too hungry to eat, starving, ravenous, alone so long he didn’t remember who’d first cast him out’ but it is his mission to exterminate him. Unbeknownst to Carmody, Parson is biding his time in the ...”

“... this book, although it is central to Thomson’s development. The problem facing Thomson scholars may be that he left no clear account of the role religion played in his stylistic conversion, or at least no account as unequivocal as that of his near contemporary, George Gilbert Scott, the most prolific of the English Goths. Reading Pugin, Scott recounted in ...”

“... fight in February, the Las Vegas Hilton announced an estimated loss of $3 million. Similar losses may well have been incurred in July. Yet the money earned by Tyson in the time it takes to fry a scallop is generous by any standard – $20 million for flattening Spinks – and well beyond the likely lifetime earnings of all the PAL gym boxers ...”

“... human weight they once carried in their own time. When such an offering is made, the chill shades may speak to us again, and perhaps more gently than we had thought they might, in the strange tongue of a long-lost Christianity. Whether they will say anything of help or comfort for our own times the readers of this book must decide for themselves.’ Brown’s ...”

“... the Times, and nothing was ever printed which he thought unfair. He hints strongly that matters may not have been quite so squeaky-clean since he ceased to be editor, and even expresses a few doubts (more of this anon) about the way things are now going. But the idea that he and ‘Rupe’ started the slide towards perdition is dismissed as the jealousy of ...”

“... pain of breaking up; it is all a supremely masochistic exercise. Along the way, intense pleasure may be derived from the experience, however intermittent, of selfless musical co-operation at a high level of intensity. But that brings its own dangers. Alcohol and drugs are an almost inevitable concomitant of such high-tension music-making, largely because ...”

“... experiences were not so desperate or tragic as he would have us believe.” ’ However that may be, we have the evidence of Herbert Read – himself certainly a wartime soldier of distinction and, incidentally, the author of one of the best accounts of action on the Western Front, In Retreat – that in 1917 Aldington ‘looked extremely handsome in his ...”

“... totality of its rupture with the past: ‘not only did the middle class thus rule society, but it may be said to have formed it.’ But, for the moderate liberals, this infant society had to be protected against monsters on either flank. Too strong a blow against the Ancien Régime’s relics, and the plebs might submerge the Revolution in violence and ...”

“... that he has brought the devils to Loudun, at least metaphorically, in rousing passions which he may not share but which he is pleased to have roused. But he hasn’t. He is not a sorcerer, only a man not trying to be an angel, and it is this acknowledgement which allows him to suffer and die with impeccable courage, accepting none of the charges against him ...”

“... satirised, it is not in disgrace. The manifold interpretations of life lie side by side, or one may come to the rescue of the others. Tolstaya’s world is crowded with physical objects. It is also magical, animated, and conscious of all there is from the enormous sky to the ‘secret potato cities’ beneath the soil. The fog is impatient, the ...”

“... gamble, a piece of newspeak. For each generation of theatregoers some new piece of rough magic may either lose or win an audience: hard to say which until it happens. It was this sort of trick – two discontented men reading the ‘posh papers’ as the curtain goes up – that was new in Look Back in Anger, as well as its new style in indignation. At the ...”

“... quite a simple reason: to make a strange name look stranger still. Whoever or whatever Salammbô may turn out to be, whether place or person, he, she or it cannot be French. There is a first evidence of that in the unnatural combination of a double m followed by a b; and the final circumflexed ô clinches it. Salammbô is a Punic name, and some measure at ...”

“... acquiring that English veneer that had eluded Hume and Ferguson and the other Scots literati. He may have thought as he rode north to his home town, Kirkcaldy in Fife, in August 1746, that he had made a mistake. Let us look at Smith’s sentence a little more closely. In it there are two quantities, £500 and 800 men, which are brought into a sort of ...”

“... and there are fears that, as in Italy a few years ago, a whole generation of political leaders may have to be sacrificed. There is no doubt that the political class has been badly frightened by the public response to the paedophile affair – and been galvanised into quite untypically rapid action. Even King Albert, an easy-going monarch who involves ...”

“... his extension of dialectics from history to nature courts precisely this danger. Othello may be said to be internally contradictory, but in what sense is an onion? What of the case that contradictions apply to the realm of meaning rather than of matter, and can be used of badgers and bananas only in some far-fetched metaphorical sense? Both history ...”