“... As I drive a Fiesta, I applaud the common sense of the Hungarians. Hungary still has all the marks of a proud traditional state. It has an uninterrupted history for almost a thousand years. The actual date of foundation is 896, and since then the Hungarian state has always maintained some sort of existence. The Hungarian Parliament claims to be older ...”

“... and whiskers with sad, rheumy eyes – Matthew Arnold, Carlyle, Swinburne, William Morris, Leslie Stephen, Tennyson – giving off a steamy despair. They had heard the melancholy long withdrawing roar of faith, and they did not like the sound of it. Today relegated to a wall in a side room, these literary men seem to take second billing to the wall where the ...”

“... civil litigation, criminal justice means votes. It is the role of the prosecutor which probably marks the sharpest division between accusatorial and inquisitorial systems. Sir Robin Auld came to the conclusion that early identification of the issues was the key to an efficient criminal justice system, and that this meant not only a competent defence but ...”

“... in an ordinary voice; they tend to strike attitudes, to write in a shout, using many exclamation marks and flogging the pathetic fallacy for all and more than it’s worth: the relentless tide, the savage breakers, the gale ‘shouting and moaning then in anger and torment as we steadily pressed our iron into its ponderable body’.To return to the ...”

“... on a single page; flashbacks nest within flashbacks, and dialogue is sometimes inside quotation marks, sometimes not, maybe according to a subtle scheme, maybe not. The narrative voice – the story is told by several omniscient angels – is distractingly complex. The Children’s Hospital is ambitious, but suffers from a deep, if carefully ...”

“... schoolchildren are told not to be big-headed and taught to be very careful about using exclamation marks in their stories and essays (Walcott, of course, spikes his text with them – ‘and that is/their bounty!’, ‘come on now, enough!’, ‘Bounty!’, ‘ah yes!, don’t interrupt!’), and in universities the Marys have won out over the Marthas: no ...”

“... this document prompted in sections of the media, but it included a headline without quotation marks or attribution: ‘Christians are being crucified by our judges.’ It is central to my theme that what a judge privately thinks or believes neither qualifies nor disqualifies him in the ordinary way for deciding sensitive and controversial cases. But the ...”

“... first to point out that ‘hate away’ would have sounded to Elizabethans like ‘Hathaway’; Stephen Booth added that since the word ‘and’ was regularly pronounced ‘an’, Shakespeare may be hinting in the poem’s final line that ‘Ann saved my life.’ It’s an ingenious reading, though I’m not persuaded. Germaine Greer has no ...”

“... to dispel this bad publicity for the school by revealing his (quite respectable) examination marks in a letter to a Munich newspaper. Whatever the case, Einstein did not enjoy his school years, and when his parents moved away from Munich in 1894, escaped without graduating on the grounds that he was medically unfit for further schooling and that, where ...”

“... about the pictures one way or the other. Millais’s change of style from dry to wet, from small marks to big ones, is not unique or even unusual. Lucian Freud, for example, has changed from thin paint, small brushes and fine detail to thick paint broadly applied. There is a kind of release in this; finicky marks give way ...”

“... itself. In this sense, Cosmic Connections is far shorter than it may seem.The book also bears the marks of its long gestation and late arrival. In his eagerness to guide the reader through vast and tangled territory, Taylor often repeats material, in both the main text and the footnotes, and distinguishes the themes, facets and phases of his account so often ...”

“... Henry II sought to limit ecclesiastical privileges, which had expanded under his predecessor, Stephen of Blois (1135-54), and to re-establish royal authority in the kingdom. To do so, it was necessary ‘to recollect and carefully write down’ the ‘ancient customs’ that had governed the law during the reign of Henry I (1100-35). Only in January ...”

“... all when he came into the kitchen. – Fuck off, Jimmy Sr shouted. One of the aces brought off by Stephen Frears in his recent film of The Snapper was to capture this household madness: a chaotic glue in which all matters – serious or trivial – are suspended. Cupboards are jammed with linen, damp towels cover the bathroom floor, siblings are torturing ...”

“... an offensive paper. Nearly everyone knows what it is to be exposed to painful opinions – to poor marks, demotions, undeserved redundancies. Those who write books, however, have to take it in public. It’s not surprising that poets and novelists can be so savage with each other when they climb into the judgment seat themselves: they may have had more than ...”

“... being involved in a male brothel scandal, and a close friend of his Cambridge tutor, James Kenneth Stephen, a cousin of Virginia Woolf, who fasted to death in an asylum after Eddy died. Is that all the scandal, then? Well no, not quite. Eddy died in 1892 only weeks after he became engaged to Princess May (as the future queen was then known). We are invited to ...”