“... and financial character, should be judged in this light and accepted only in so far as they may be held to promote and not to hinder the achievement of this fundamental objective.’ One searches the new treaty in vain for a provision that would oblige economic and monetary policy to be indexed to an improvement in people’s living and working ...”

“... he knew well. There is acute literary criticism scattered about in his own books, some of which may be quoted. For instance, on James Joyce in The Dog at Clambercrown, which opens with Brooke reading Ulysses in the plane on the way to a holiday in Sicily: Ulysses, I suppose, is the most fascinating and the most devastatingly boring novel ever written ... I ...”

“... more than gain in the habit of generously watching others; and the capacity to enjoy Shakespeare may balance a lost aptitude for playing at soldiers. Terror is gone out of our lives, moreover; we no longer see the devil in the bed-curtains nor lie awake to listen to the wind.’While he was at Edinburgh Academy, Stevenson is said to have fought a duel with ...”

“... pace and narrative. Got to stop it from galloping away.The sense of overspilling delight may owe something to her new romance with V but, even early in the relationship, it seems to rise in her and leave at the same time. H notes ‘the jumping force field of interest between V and me, both mutual and outward, that makes the world seem so rich and ...”

“... and hideous epithets in the English language, meant to dehumanise Black people … Some people may try to defend O’Connor by saying that when she was alive the word didn’t fully hold the freight it holds now, and that the word was commonly used in the South at the time and the use of it is in service of verisimilitude. But surely O’Connor, with her ...”

“... to get married and the destruction of the wedding dress (and the house itself). The conflagration may not be testimony, but it’s evidence of a kind, signalling extremes of eagerness and refusal. Yon’s book doesn’t succeed in either passing it off as accidental or accepting what it would mean for it to be deliberate.She doesn’t scrutinise the ...”

“... for Christian ideological reasons, together with popular observance of a handful of customs that may or may not predate Christianity – bonfires on Midsummer Night, for instance. Medieval European Catholic Christian elites created a continent-wide identity, which one Anglo-Saxon writer under the patronage of King Alfred ...”

“... example – which would break once and for all with the hegemonic discourse of ‘English’. One may doubt whether theorising can have an end in the way that Eagleton hopefully envisages. As philosophy continues to be vexed by old problems – despite all Wittgenstein’s efforts to let the fly out of the bottle – so criticism seems unable to effect that ...”

“... photograph, while Abstract Expressionism, or whatever its equivalent in ongoing American poetry may be, continues its fissiparous course. Is Lowell the victim of what he himself called ‘the bravado of perpetual revolution, breakthrough as the stereotype, with nothing preserved’? That, in a sense, would be a fit end for a king, remaining embalmed in the ...”

“... At the start, Thompson states explicitly that he will not deal with motivation. But motivation may be the key to understanding what distinguishes this emigrant cohort from the great majority of their compatriots who resisted the uprooting forces and stayed home, and it may suggest dynamic elements that cannot be found in ...”

“... money off kids in bars, grab at girls, shout ‘I’m Jack Kerouac, the world-famous author!’ He may now be the sort of writer whose life is just as well known as his writing. When I reached the area near Columbia University, I remembered that as a student young Kerouac had looked out of his Livingston Hall dormitory straight at a frieze on the side of the ...”

“... while assaulting the wandering eye and disrupting the balance of the room. Harmony and balance may suggest tranquillity, yet the spatial character of the rococo interior is often vertiginously exciting, the ornament enticing as well as diverting. In one of the smaller rooms at Stupinigi is the soffitto a ghiacci e finte porcellane, a ceiling covered with ...”

“... the international community took action: the refugee crisis was to cost it billions in aid. On 9 May 1994, a month into the genocide, the House of Commons was told by Mark Lennox-Boyd, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office, that in Rwanda 200,000 people ‘may have perished in a horrific and tragic ...”

“... Why should cattle be deprived of a calcium supplement? Cement dust, which is an oxide of calcium, may be just the thing: the US Department of Agriculture says a shovelful of cement dust in the trough produces a 30 per cent faster weight gain. There is a problem about delivering all this supercharged supplement to a beast with a digestive tract designed by ...”

“... former biographies did – to bring Keats’s life and work again into visibility. Younger readers may first encounter here all the incomparable quotations (from Keats’s letters and poems, and from the papers of the Keats circle) that biographies of the poet must include. The effect of Keats’s brilliant prose is to make any reader love the book in which he ...”