“... before Christmas in 1925 for ever poisoned that holiday for him. As to any direct influence Anna may have had on her son’s writing, we have only the evidence of the answer she gave a reporter who’d asked her about one of Mencken’s columns: ‘I haven’t read it. I never read anything he writes. That’s his business.’ But we do know that she shared ...”

“... of our necessities we can at least understand them. But by the time you finish this book you may think that reason giving and receiving sounds more compulsive (and compulsory) than anything else, more of a symptom than a godsend. Why it is that the giving and receiving of reasons is essential to our sociability – why this is one of the forms our ...”

“... personal and creative history (at one point, there is a flashback to the Cuban childhood he may or may not have had). At the heart of the venture was an attempt to communicate: users must find their own way around the CD-Rom, and Marker’s hope was that ‘there should be enough familiar codes here . . . that the ...”

“... ways, uncovering a substratum of India within the white colonialist. Kipling’s mother tongue may have been English, but those other mothers, the native nurses and household servants, had left their mark on him. In Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language, Daniel Heller-Roazen recounts a parallel story. Elias Canetti grew up in Bulgaria speaking ...”

“... to be withdrawn from the mainland to try to hold the line in Crete, itself abandoned at the end of May. At the same time, the new Iraqi regime bombed the British base at Habbaniya. The capture of Ethiopia that month, and the return of its emperor, Haile Selassie, was of little consolation. Wavell was now in Churchill’s sights. The last straw was his initial ...”

“... reasoned hypothesis) as one component of ‘adequate historical explanation’. Its propositions may not be susceptible of proof; but if we talked only about what we could prove, our commentaries on the past, and on the present, would be too jejune to retain attention. Williamson distances himself from the problem by collapsing the distinction between the ...”

“... for example, he claimed that ‘Eberhart ... is a prolific writer, so the metaphysical pieces may merely be poetic callisthenics to keep him fit until his next burst of creative energy.’ Of Hugh MacDiarmid in 1962: ‘He has managed a curious creative amalgam of old and new, uniting great feeling for his country, its traditions and language, with the ...”

“... whereas boys who carry knives into the playground are likely to be reported to the police. This may be wise, but the boys with knives understand something about war that the boys with model soldiers don’t: war is an intimate business. Some of the nastiest things happen close up, between individuals. Sometimes they don’t involve weapons. At dinner ...”

“... element in her writing. Her pleasure in food was certainly connected with her enjoyment of sex. It may not, as Cooper says, have been literally true that when they were at sea Cowan used to tie David naked to the mast and whip her, but the mere possibility explains a lot about her ability to make ‘an omelette and a glass of wine’ sound so ...”

“... make any sense. It’s the poverty of the possible in such cases that makes us think the job may be impossible, and of course with poetry the difficulties escalate drastically, since now we have rhythm and tonality and undercurrents and much else to deal with. Paterson says his (excellent) versions of a selection of Antonio Machado’s poems are ...”

“... its modern meaning of ‘fake’ or ‘insincere’, ‘plastic’ has made a circuit. Though we may deplore artificial manners we invest in artificial intelligence. And now that the art of plastics resides in science and technology, we are curiously nostalgic and indulgent towards those mid-century years of plastic pocketbooks and Lucite belt ...”

“... more fascinated by Ireland than the English are, or indeed than the Irish are. These interests may have been latent all along; but it can’t be easy being a meticulously scholarly, politically right-of-centre critic whose current preoccupations happen by a remarkable stroke of ill luck to coincide with those of the post-colonial theoretical trendies one ...”

“... of wheel-clamping in Dublin would suggest that old anti-colonial habits die hard. Tories may not all have been the Zapata figures they have been cracked up to be, but Irish rebellion was not without its aura of romance. Agrarian secret societies such as the Whiteboys, Rightboys, Defenders, Dingers, Black Hens, Blackfeet, Rockites, Shanavests and ...”

“... major cities would end up underwater. And we aren’t looking at a multigenerational timescale: we may see a four-degree rise over the next sixty years. ‘The science around four degrees keeps moving,’ Marshall notes, ‘usually in the direction of greater pessimism.’ What explains the gulf between what we know about these potential terrors and what we ...”

“... East’s complexities. ‘Be careful,’ their argument goes, ‘when you reach Syria or Iraq you may end up killing Muslims.’ True enough, but it’s hardly a clarion call. Obama and Cameron have condemned the Islamic State’s barbarity but – in contrast to the rhetoric of Bush and Blair – they haven’t spoken passionately about the virtues of the ...”