“... structure. There are times when Milton appears to represent Satan as his secret sharer, and, as Stephen Fallon argues in the Companion, he can hesitate between a heroic self-conception, ‘as unparalleled spokesperson of God’, and the fear that by over-reaching he has forfeited God’s favour. That fear and the anxiety that he is shadowing Satan’s ...”

“... in the frank confessional of David Schalkwyk’s opening chapter. In the apartheid world, the young Schalkwyk ‘was defined legally, socially and … psychologically as a “master”’, even as the material realities of bondage were masked (and painfully complicated) by the emotional bonds built up through years of familiarity and ‘surrogate ...”

“... sanitary and convenience products spewing into London’s river. Taylor Geall, the bright young fabulist charged by his Super Sewer employers, Tideway, with selling an upbeat message about reconnecting Londoners with the Thames (even when large sections of river frontage were closed off for the construction), commutes from Bognor Regis. His repurposed ...”

“... in the landing gear of aircraft and die. By the end of the 1990s it was thought that the number of young women being smuggled into the EU every year from the former Eastern bloc and forced into prostitution was in the hundreds of thousands. It is not hard to see why the traffickers are vilified by governments, police and the press. They can foil the defences ...”

“... the British people and hardworking taxpayers. The former Conservative prime minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, in 2015: The opposition will say, now, let’s spend and spend and spend. But, next year, we will use the fiscal room to do what we promised: cut taxes for hardworking Canadian families. The US Republican Marco Rubio, who wants to be ...”

“... these lines were tumbling off the presses: a symposium entitled International Regimes, edited by Stephen Krasner (1983); Keohane’s own treatise, After Hegemony (1984); and a host of learned articles.In the following decade this reassuring doctrine underwent a mutation, with the publication of a volume entitled Regime Changes: Macroeconomic Policy and ...”

“... writes, and despite his desire to feel what the poor feel, ‘there is a hauteur about him.’ The young Zbig was long on language skills, short on introspection. As a PhD candidate at Harvard, ‘he would bludgeon, set traps, ambush and trip up. His manner, which did little to disguise that he thought he was cleverer than most people, left many of his ...”

“... effect of piano playing on this ordinary girl: ‘disjoined from her music-stool, [she] was only a young lady with a quantity of dark hair and a very pretty, pale, undeveloped face.’ As yet she doesn’t live as she plays, but Mr Beebe is, of course, prescient. Much later in his life, Forster, speculating whimsically about the future of some of his ...”

“... of, in turn, Edna St Vincent Millay, Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Roethke, Virginia Woolf and Stephen Vincent Bénet.When her friend Ann Davidow left Smith after one term, Plath’s first letter to her, written through tears, told her that although she’d come third in the nationwide Seventeen short story contest, ‘what the hell do I care about ...”

“... about the CIA involvement in its finances, another idea came up. Some of those figures like Stephen Spender, Frank Kermode and Stuart Hampshire wanted to start a counter-magazine.I don’t think ‘Encounter’ had folded by then.No, it hadn’t but Spender had left. Spender was a big figure in the CIA controversy. So the projected magazine would be a ...”

“... Carpenter’s excellent life of Auden has a nice turn of phrase in recounting the moment when Stephen Spender, arrived in an Oxford of the later Twenties which was pervaded by the legend of Auden, at last met his fellow undergraduate and ‘found the reality just as remarkable as that legend’. The story appears to have come from Spender, himself ...”

“... will suffer only one defect per million. ‘Transferred to the arena of municipal waste,’ said Stephen Tindale of Greenpeace, Zero Waste forces attention onto the whole life cycle of products. Zero Waste encompasses producer responsibility, ecodesign, waste reduction, reuse and recycling, all within a single framework. It breaks away from the ...”

“... walking on two legs. I heard he was one of the hooded men in a video showing the decapitation of a young American, Nick Berg, although the men never removed their hoods. I heard that he had died recently in Mosul when eight men blew themselves up rather than surrender to the US forces who had surrounded their house. I heard Sheikh Jawad al-Kalesi, an important ...”

“... Rania was always making cakes and bringing them in for the staff and she got to know the other young mothers. As well as befriending Naseem she was close to another mother from the tower, Munira, who lived on the fifth floor. It was a strong Muslim community: many were from the Middle East, but a sizeable number were from Morocco, and some of the local ...”

“... war was too profound for that to happen; it lost credibility only gradually. The British SF writer Stephen Baxter, who trained at the RAE, where he worked beside the engineers who’d gathered up V2 fragments in 1944, says of the postwar mood: ‘Maybe we became more content – post-imperial, in a way post-industrial, almost bucolic – and you don’t ...”