“... coda: and the audience which desires secularisation primarily as a prelude to a united Ireland may not be nearly as sizeable or as committed as Dr Fitzgerald and his advisers evidently believe. It is too often assumed that ‘the Dublin view’ is the Republican view tout court. In fact, the last ten years have drastically moderated Southern ...”

“... spouses, trying not to irritate the performers with ‘hairsplitting Notes’. Play directors may come to suppose that everything can be done by Notes. When I was a student I appeared in a play by Michael Codron, directed by his friend, Adrian Brown: just before we went on, Codron appeared to give us a Note. ‘Adrian is making this too heavy and ...”

“... identical twins: Babies actually do get lost or separated, and, however rare such an event may be, when a person finds his twin it feeds the common fantasy that any one of us might have a clone, a doppelgänger; someone who is not only a human mirror but also an ideal companion; someone who understands me perfectly, almost perfectly, because he is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... what the term actually means. Instead, we try to make sense of it in conjunction with words that may come with it, and which we can understand well enough on their own – words like ‘welfare’, ‘intervention’, ‘sanction’, ‘control’, ‘security’. During the Eighties the key words were ...”

“... an extended consciousness of one’s fate and the ability to articulate it for others. So tragedy may seem, to some of the critics Eagleton takes to task, the wrong word for the experience of those who died. But this must surely be false. While some will have died instantly others must have had time for conscious reflection. Certainly, most of those in the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... lambasted it in the House of Commons for its ‘gross boastfulness’: ‘It is written, if I may say so, in the style of “How Bill Adams Won the Battle of Waterloo”. The writer has been so anxious to show how important he was, how invariably he was right, and how much more he could tell if only his mouth was not what he was pleased to call ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... whether and where you or your offspring live in the Occupied Territories is not up to you; you may or may not be allowed to keep the land your family has owned for generations; you may or may not be allowed to move outside your village, town, city or ...”

“... am the Fellow with the great belly, and he my Dogge.’ No one now quite follows this joke, which may be an airy reference (to distract attention) to the Man in the Moon. What is more interesting than Falstaff’s ancient joke is his capacity to make us listen to him while he tells it. We concentrate.Falstaff can get away with this debate as to who ...”

“... 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 ...”