“... the media and the political interests that so often govern them. Evidence of death and destruction may be immediate, flashed across the world in real time by the major networks as on 11 September 2001, or it may take time to be sifted through alternative websites and sources (easier to access in some places than ...”

“... as he blocked the doorway into the ward where the policemen were being treated. The election may have come too late. If it had happened in the months after the invasion, Iraqis would not have felt they were being occupied by an imperial power. If the army and police had not been dissolved in May 2003, the guerrillas ...”

“... for granted that there is a wound in the (modern) artist, it is interesting to be reminded that we may have been looking for it in the wrong place, that we might have the wrong picture of how suffering turns into words. Writers don’t suffer with ideas, they suffer in style. ‘Everything,’ writes Axel Vander, the sly hero-narrator of John Banville’s ...”

“... where it seems to be due. Very little credit indeed is due to the Graeco-Roman tradition. Plutarch may have spoken out against animal abuse – ‘We should not use living creatures like old shoes or pots and pans and throw them away when they are worn out or broken with service’ – but for the Romans, cruelty was an art form. The circus apparently began in ...”

“... not necessarily concision or compactness, so much as a high degree of chosenness – a story may seem gratuitous; but without a lining of gratuity, a story may seem too necessary, may not seem like a story at all. Muriel Spark, a novelist drawn to the parable, to the ballad, the ...”

“... work – the idea of mixing the two functions was one that Read had outlined in an article of May 1939. The contemporary American art, which included work by Jackson Pollock, Rothko, Motherwell and Baziotes, was legitimised, and in some measure influenced, by the European imports that hung around the corner. What we find in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection ...”

“... that are more than metaphors, are not likely to go away.Literature is full of examples, which may be especially instructive when they don’t concern literal ghosts. ‘It is impossible to lay the ghost of a fact,’ Marlow says in Lord Jim, a little before Stephen Dedalus starts his discussion in a Dublin library – only four years before, if we think ...”

“... theory. They are, as Paul Ricoeur says, ‘social poetry’, a poetry which, in the end, ‘may dissolve politics’. And like all poetry they reject precise literary definition. For the historian of political thought this poses quite serious definitional problems, problems which Krishan Kumar’s book does little to resolve. The Golden Age, the Land of ...”

“... her nature, drew her mouth to the wound in his side and let her drink to her heart’s content. We may or may not, down the generations and across belief systems, consider this behaviour holy, but would anyone deny that it is disgusting? Mind you, relativism dies hard: there are South American peoples who regularly feast on ...”

“... crude oil is ‘heavy’ and ‘sour’ – difficult and costly to extract and refine. This may explain why Trump has floated the idea of using US tax revenues to compensate oil companies for their trouble. But it also strongly implies that the oil companies weren’t pushing for this policy. The larger point to bear in mind is that, while there has ...”

“... with the infirmities of old age.’ She is indeed ready to die, and it is a difficulty that Justin may feel that he has to do the same. In the Sudan she declares: ‘My time is up.’ She is infatuated with a handsome police chief, goes rather grimly to bed with him in the time he can spare from gambling sessions, and then kills herself. Justin goes back to ...”

“... in ‘Mark Stafford’s Wife’ she is imitating Henry James, in ‘The Wheat’ she is imitating May Sinclair and in ‘The Fatal Fidelity’ she seems to be having a shot at W.W. Jacobs. Her first story, ‘Passed’, is the most impulsive and interesting of the lot. The subject is guilt. A respectable young woman hardens her heart when a prostitute appeals ...”

“... be thought to belong to a modern world in which ghosts need to be explained, and in which they may be explained as symptoms of a disordered mind, of ‘nerves’ and exhaustion. ‘He had been working very hard lately.’ This man, in 1911, a painter haunted by a model knocked down in the Fulham Road, had been expecting something, and ‘was enough of a ...”

“... were about its bias against the Tories and against the prime minister in particular – which may come as a surprise to anyone who observed the venting of Labour voters on Twitter (it may simply be that Tories are more likely to write to the manager). The BBC News website, however, remained the most visited news source ...”

“... Every year on 8 May, a young woman dressed in armour and carrying a white banner rides in procession through the streets of Orléans in north-central France. Dignitaries of Church and State join in commemorating an event and a life. The event is the French relief of the city, after months of siege by the English, in 1429; the life is that of Joan of Arc, a 17-year-old girl from Lorraine told by heavenly voices to go ‘into France’ and to rescue Orléans ...”