“... like an Icelandic version of that cultural bravado which is the other half of cultural cringe: one may doubt whether the kings of Norway really took as much notice of Icelandic wanderers as the sagas say they do. Nor are the sagas, for the most part, very concerned about these foreign exploits. The Viking Age had little impact on them. In the 10th and 11th ...”

“... it came out just ten days before the catastrophic defeat of Union forces at Bull Run – but there may have been other reasons, for this sceptical tale makes uncomfortable reading. It is the story of two sisters’ entanglement with a glamorous family condemned to destroy themselves through drink and wilfulness. Violence and jealousy drive the action. The ...”

“... penury with Trapnel is a tribute to his late friend’s remarkable effect on women; Maclaren-Ross may have lacked funds, but he was never short of adoring women. ‘People think because a novel’s invented, it isn’t true,’ Trapnel remarks at the beginning of a long monologue on the art of biography. Placed beside Paul Willetts’s oddly spiritless ...”

“... yellow light, ye distant groves! And kindle, thou blue Ocean! So my friend Struck with deep joy may stand, as I have stood, Silent with swimming sense; yea, gazing round On the wide landscape, gaze till all doth seem Less gross than bodily; and of such hues As veil the Almighty Spirit, when yet he makes Spirits perceive his presence. In the picture as well ...”

“... a set of Eight Poems of Li-Po, dedicated hopefully (but in vain) to the silent film actress Anna May Wong, with whom he was distantly in love; and his most famous work, perhaps his only really famous work, The Rio Grande, is choral. Lloyd’s biography chronicles all this somewhat relentlessly, with frequent digressions into background information of ...”

“... we can win here … In the end, we must enforce a principle whereby the only way the powerful may enjoy privacy is when it is the same kind shared by the ordinary: one enforced by the laws of nature, rather than the policies of man. Greenwald next saw some documents. His heart is always racing, he’s always plunging in, getting excited, and he’s always ...”

“... done, not what they really feel. For all anyone knows, a person’s commitment to a given cause may be hesitant or vacillating. It is the appearance of wholeheartedness that makes a difference because it has the ability to engage thousands of others – perhaps in their hearts equally hesitant – in collective action. Even the politics of hope requires a ...”

“... that Sinn Féin possesses a radical core beneath a moderate façade, the real concern is that it may be the other way round. That’s something that will play out over the next few years. Right now, the crucial decisions about the future of the country are still being made a long way from Dublin. The European economic commissioner, Olli Rehn, weighed in ...”

“... that would echo the speculation, in Les Fleurs du mal, that ‘perfumes, colours, sounds may correspond’, that fusing music and sound with colour and light would push the viewer/listener into a realm beyond thought. Baudelaire himself, like Delacroix and Madame de Staël, revered music’s ‘absence of reasoning’, an escape into pure ...”

“... desire to score points is the only conceivable reason for reading The Man without Qualities. It may be that these views belong only to Madeleine, who can’t imagine any sensible person really believing in all this stuff. But Eugenides never allows us to see it as anything but a pose. It’s in the nature of this kind of theory that its worth can be ...”

“... of less than £2000, they proposed to pay the managing director alone £350 a year). But Cambridge may in any case have been an unwise place in which to launch a venture of this kind. The locals, it’s been suggested, were never likely to be enticed away from bathing in the Cam (and certainly not if the alternative cost two and six). Ferdinand Mount, who ...”

“... rowing. Her father retires to his tent. Layton gropes her, and it seems for a moment as if he may be going to rape her, but he lets her go. In the morning everyone behaves as if nothing has happened. Almost the worst thing about it is the uncertainty as to how far Sam’s father and uncle were complicit. Pimping Sam to ensure Layton’s co-operation in ...”

“... the Tea Party Movement, are ready and waiting in the corner to resume normal programming.) Oprah may have changed the status of black women in the media, but her trouble, a trouble she can’t quite dismiss, may put her a generation behind those heading for a truer Promised Land. The charge runs counter to the notion that ...”

“... American politics is propelled by laws quite different from any known in Europe. A great deal may be traced back to the elections of the 1960s. Jeff Manza and Clem Brooks, in their study Social Cleavages and Political Change: Voter Alignments and US Party Coalitions (1999), found that the old religious split between voters was deepest in 1960, as ...”

“... doctrine and financial prudence. Defoe himself was no stranger to exotic adventure, even though he may never have left his native country. The son of a prosperous London tallow chandler, he set himself up as a haberdasher, ran a profitable brick and tile factory, dabbled in marine insurance, imported and exported a range of goods and, as a convinced ...”