“... fewer artillery strikes on the city than in the east of the country. But there are signs that this may be changing. On 14 March, an artillery strike hit an apartment building in the Obolon district. Another residential building in the west of the city was hit on 15 March. On 20 March, a missile hit a shopping centre, killing eight people. Most of the defences ...”

“... and Chouchou on holiday near Arcachon in 1916. Debussy died in 1918. A century later, his music may at first appear more decorative than radical. The shock of the new is hard to feel at a distance, but as Stephen Walsh observes, we expect the music of the modernist generation, of whom Debussy was the first, to be difficult, abstruse, even rebarbative. The ...”

“... of Book of Numbers) has no philosophically enforceable link with the author, however much they may seem to coincide biographically. In Roth’s book the doubling brought themes of identity and reliability into play, while here it’s a mechanism (providing, in fact, the basic impetus of the plot) for bringing into contact two unrelated worlds, even two ...”

“... since the Fall of the Wall. If the best way to make sense of the seventy years of the Soviet Union may be as an episode – a destabilising interim – in the order of warring nation-states, then a comparison with Napoleon inevitably crops up. How well, we might ask, roughly thirty years after Waterloo, had ‘Europe’ succeeded in managing the memory of the ...”

“... said: ‘No, I haven’t.’ When the audience began to laugh, Armstrong beamed back at them. He may have appeared remote, but that scene, which appears in Moon Launch Live, shows how easily he could establish a rapport. ‘Silence is a Neil Armstrong answer,’ his wife, Janet, once said. ‘The word “no” is an argument.’ Also: ‘I’m not married to ...”

“... signal the intimation of half-thoughts, shadowy promptings of a kind that only a first-rate writer may catch in words. There is a scene early in The Shopworn Angel where he sits in a taxi beside Margaret Sullavan, a soldier accepting a lift from a posh woman, speaking softly partly because he is shy of her beauty but also because he feels in the wrong: she is ...”

“... at Ragoleti, and get him to hand over the three onze and twelve sacks of grain owing to me from May up to the present.’ But Jeli corrects him: ‘No, it’s only two and a quarter, because you left the cows over a month ago, and you mustn’t steal from the hand that feeds you.’ ‘That’s true!’ his father agrees, and promptly dies. This is a scene ...”

“... law’. This very trope currently forms the moral cement of the American Right. There may or may not be a suggestive and contradictory connection between ‘Ravelstein’s’ secretive sex life and his attachment to arcane doctrines – between the erotic and the esoteric – but Bellow can’t seem to be ...”

“... to escape the ‘monologic’ perspective of the ideology or set of opinions or beliefs the author may have held in real life. With Oe, too, it might be preferable to dissociate the author from ideas he merely seems to endorse (I will touch on the ‘sacrificial’ and on religion itself later on); and where the Naturalists might have offered us a ...”

“... streets named after Churchill (more than 150 in Australia, only one in Cornwall). And many readers may find three chapters on Australia and New Zealand more than they need, especially when the complex reactions to him in France and Germany are covered in one broad-brush chapter on ‘Churchill and the Europeans’. The book is invaluable nonetheless, as the ...”

“... that it hadn’t. Now George Osborne is promising, should the Tories win the election in May, to put the country through the same painful and unnecessary process all over again. Why? Why did the government take decisions that were bound to put the recovery at risk, when those decisions weren’t required even according to its own rules? How did a ...”

“... have new voices issued to them, voices that stray so far from any previous conversation they may as well be talking in tongues. The details of that evening are a blur, not just because it was a long time ago but because it was a blur at the time. I was in shock. Dad was in shock, of course, but I was in shock too, from having administered one and also ...”

“... now for having once happened to someone else elsewhere? … It is my story now, not his.’ This may not be an odd way to feel, though it probably is, but it’s definitely an odd way to introduce a personal narrative. By this point there hasn’t been enough of a story for it to be claimed by anyone in particular. The reunion between narrator and aunt, for ...”

“... Auden responded to the spectacle of Tennyson’s infantile genius with peculiar emphasis then that may have been because he felt similarly charged. ‘Must hear in silence till I turn my toes up,/“It’s such a pity Wystan never grows up,”’ he complained in his ‘Letter to Lord Byron’. Leavis wasn’t the only one who thought this way about Auden, but ...”

“... but not seen. It would have been much improved by a stronger sense of context, for while Brown may be largely lost to us as a knowable individual he is not entirely so. The few papers tell us something, and the circumstances of his life and work might be pieced together convincingly enough to describe in outline the qualities of the man who was able to ...”