“... have in their minds a picture of how the world will be. How they will be in that world. The world may be many different ways for them but there is one world that will never be and that is the world they dream of.’ And this from The Road, the father thinking to himself on a visit to his childhood home: ‘This is where I used to sleep. My cot was against ...”

“... turned against what had become its greatest embarrassment. (Forget about the blood pressure.) In May 1382 the new archbishop of Canterbury, William Courtenay, an old adversary, convened a council at Blackfriars, famous for concluding its deliberations in the middle of a small earthquake, which condemned Wyclif’s more obvious heresies, a weapon aimed more ...”

“... Alice Oswald, though she may not seem it at first, is an opinionated poet of ideas, and her poetry is ambitious in both form and scope. She writes taut poems about nature but refuses to call them ‘nature poems’. Her work is ‘full of hymns’, as Elizabeth Bishop said of her own, as well as pagan shouts and birdcalls ...”

“... it’s when she took on the Modernist canon that her work most often ran awry. Pissing on Dickens may be one thing, but a writer like Pierre Guyotat is hardly in need of ‘appropriation’ by a white Jewish writer from New York. Too often, her novels were a barrage of attacks on writerly skills she lacked. Her extravagant self-presentation often worked ...”

“... too, and a little bit sad. Misha is many things, but he is never an occasion for pathos. This may be a consequence of Shteyngart’s indiscriminate joke-making. Almost nothing escapes Shteyngart’s satirical guns. He takes aim at American military contractors and their effect on the countries in which they operate: ‘Golly Burton, Golly Burton!’ the ...”

“... South – he said: ‘That’s it. I’ve just wasted eight years of my life.’ In retrospect, he may think differently; but even then it was possible to do so, or to think that ‘failure’ was too strong a word. When he became leader in 1983 the Party seemed almost down and out; it had won just 209 seats in the election of that year, and in terms of votes ...”

“... efforts – Levy’s, but also Updike’s – to understand the boy’s motives. Levy and Updike may be out of touch, but at least they realise it. Terrorist does not presume to explain Ahmad so much as try to get to know him. Acknowledging difference isn’t the same thing as resigning oneself to ignorance. At a time when so much official discourse is ...”

“... with a single phone call.’ I don’t think he wants to make that call any time soon, but he may have to. I’m not sure the Israelis will quit this time, even if that call gets made. They love Bush in Israel; but they also know he’s a schmuck, even if he’s their schmuck, and over a barrel. There’s also a mid-term election coming up and Bush ...”

“... own days, it certainly looks like it. How far the later Victorians and the Edwardians after them may be characterised as ‘military’ or ‘warlike’ is a nice question. It is true that an unmilitary, pacifistic body of opinion, the Cobdenite, internationalist main stream of Liberalism, was still strong enough in 1914 to hold Asquith’s cabinet away from ...”

“... two boobies and a noddy And then they left off eating the dead body. Though the blithe tone may reflect the narrator’s idiocy, it doesn’t stem from heartlessness on Byron’s part. He wants revulsion to come through unsoftened by sentiment. Muldoon’s strategy is similar. The poems in Moy Sand and Gravel don’t differ in kind from his previous ...”

“... need a political motive. An Israeli who orders the killing of Palestinians must know that this may well be the result. In this case Islamic Jihad has taken responsibility for the action: the personal vendetta became a political act. A political act has political aims. And the aim could only be connected to the fact that – as all the world knows ...”

“... own reading of the text that the ninth year (1470) should be, as it is, the correct date. These may seem minor matters, but if we are to be persuaded that Henry VI was regarded as a Fisher King, presiding over a late medieval Waste Land (though it was Edward, as it happens, who died after catching cold on a fishing trip), then we need to be confident of the ...”

“... of his words. Certainly, in everyday speech we allow that on occasion a doctor, for example, may make a mistake. But what qualifies a doctor as a doctor is his medical knowledge. Qua doctor, therefore, no doctor makes mistakes. So it is with rulers: The most precise way to formulate my position is to say that the ruler, insofar as he is a ruler, makes ...”

“... his first book, The Missing, Andrew O’Hagan pauses over a perception he thinks his readers may find ‘a bit surprising’. It’s an intricate moment, since he thinks we are going to be surprised at the surprise he is describing. He is telling us that people who moved from Glasgow to the Scottish New Towns springing up in the 1960s hadn’t expected ...”

“... colours, stitched from different fabric. At the same time, Taylor advises, contemporary feminists may find it rather more difficult to appreciate the religious roots of Wollstonecraft’s thoroughgoing egalitarianism. For even though much feminist thought over the centuries has been ‘deeply embedded in religious belief’, recent work on Wollstonecraft on ...”