“... ever. In my case, though, what I’m feeling does not feel remotely like grief for the old home. I may be a heartless brute (or severely ‘in denial’), but I don’t think I have any regret whatsoever for what I have left. It was great fun while it lasted, but it was too small – and all its little idiosyncrasies (the pink flowery wallpaper we didn’t get ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... or, if the shrew won’t listen, to her rather pretty, sympathetic friend: For, whatever may be said of the relation of the sexes, there is no man who loves a woman that does not desire to come to her for the renewal of his courage, for the cutting asunder of his difficulties. And that will be the mainspring of his desire for her. We are all so ...”

“... Here, with the cloud of a six-figure advance trailing behind her, comes Arundhati Roy: May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jack-fruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air ...”

“... bores imaginable, but they stick to being bores through thick and thin. Under Western eyes they may be lovably picturesque and Russian, but to many Russians – women especially – they remain bores, and all too familiar. Yerofeev’s combination of art and erudition generates comedy not by diverting boredom but by encouraging it. Alcohol is its own ...”

“... effects by pitching his rhetoric high, he keeps his voice calm and controlled. His characters may indulge in their own strain of lyricism when they talk, but as a narrator Junger tends to avoid it: The Andrea Gail has a high bow that would force Billy [Billy Tyne, the captain] to oversteer simply to stay on course. One can imagine Billy standing at the ...”

“... spotted the resemblance. George Eliot’s reply is defensive: ‘for any annoyance, even though it may have been brief and not well-founded, which the appearance of the story may have caused Mr Gwyther, the writer is sincerely sorry.’ Later, a more sophisticated method of assimilating known material helped her to avoid ...”

“... a sensitive part of her son’s anatomy? But if he was capable, why did he never marry? Brooke may have fallen in love as a young man, even becoming briefly engaged to a vicar’s daughter, and later there was a wealthy woman who became infatuated with him and lent him money. Barley concludes, however, that he was not much interested in women. On the other ...”

“... graves and English churchyards, they start up and throng around us in the paleness of their fall. May every schoolboy who reads this page be warned by the waving of their wasted hands, from that burning marle of passion where they found nothing but shame and ruin, polluted affections, and an early grave. The eponymous Eric, or Williams to his classmates, the ...”

“... William McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist. After winning a major fight with Congress in May 1908 over increasing the number of US battleships, he led the French Ambassador Jules Jusserand and four other hikers on a strenuous expedition along the Virginia side of the Potomac River. ‘When all were pouring with perspiration,’ Morris ...”

“... most likely to exist in a state which maximises the formation of black holes. This final chapter may be much more wildly speculative than the rest of the book, but these are remarkable and provocative ideas. So how does the research described here fit into the overall picture of modern physics? In numerical terms there are today about a thousand string ...”

“... like eyes or compasses, a face Of mathematic fixity, spotlight Within whose circumscription we may set All solitudes of love, room for love’s face, Love’s projects green with leaves, Love’s monuments like tombstones on our lives. ‘The Broken Bowl’ typifies the meretricious humourlessness of Merrill’s early poetry. The later work has none of ...”

“... rather to have come to terms with that later). However, psychologically interesting as this may be, Booth insists that Brunette Coleman is, ‘just as importantly, a creative amalgam of diverse literary influences’. Such as? Um, the impact of ‘Yeats’s poems spoken by women (“;A Woman Young and Old”) is audible in such poems as ...”

“... inside, however inert, outside changes remorselessly. So for example, the general election that May was a terrible wrench; an assault on my inwardness. Of course I had to abandon the ‘article’ – editing, cutting or finishing anything about Raphael’s life seemed psychologically impossible. As well as being grateful, I was shocked at how swiftly ...”