“... and known as Ilios or Troia to the ancient Greeks – lie under a mound called Hissarlik in north-western Turkey. The events of the Iliad supposedly take place around the time of the collapse of the Bronze Age in the 12th century BC. By the time the poem was composed, several hundred years later, Troy was abandoned, its history constituted by rumour and ...”

“... of the servant can express a refusal to follow directions issued from above. As Dickens’s Susan Nipper (loyal and memorably insubordinate servant to the Dombey family) retorts, ‘it’s one thing to give orders, and quite another thing to take ’em.’ Placed in the margins of the novel’s characterisation and action, the apparently inconsequential ...”

“... about forcing the British to leave. The Irish had done it, so had the Indians, indeed so had the North Americans. The British would never listen to negotiations unless there was force, I said.’ The cogency of this analysis is a little suspect, coming from someone who takes no interest in world affairs and has been brought up by a mother of unbridled ...”

“... her companions in the new Berg Women’s Series, Mme de Stael and Emily Dickinson.* Unfortunately Susan Goodman’s book is somewhat unbalanced, sloppily written (‘her heart over brimmed with romance’), littered with irritating errors and grammatical infelicities, falling far short of the standard set for the series by Renée Winegarten’s excellent ...”

“... piece in praise of things which HM Government thinks very bad for your health. The price of what Susan Sontag has praised as Hitchens’s ‘high velocity’ can be the occasional slip: Disraeli did not ‘become’ prime minister in 1876, nor did Queen Victoria become Empress of India ‘within a few years’ (it was actually 1876); nor did Eden resign over ...”

“... our second spring). It was never published and he never read it, but it was in part a response to Susan Sontag’s attack on the idea of illness as a metaphor. Metaphors seemed to both of us then a possible defence, protective colouring – provided there were plenty of them, proliferating like vines. For instance, instead of the militarist notions of ...”

“... it was winter-time – late December, the very depths – and to add to it the train was heading north – to Leningrad – so it was quickly darkening on the other side of the windows – bright lights of Moscow stations flashing into view and vanishing again behind me like the scattering of some invisible hand – each snow-veiled suburban platform with ...”

“... and put into practice by one of the party’s most famous women leaders. Wilkinson came from the north, represented the shipyards of Jarrow and always spoke for the workers. Yet this well-written biography surprises us: she may have been a founding spirit of the party but her interests, associations and beliefs took her a long way from the straightforward ...”

“... an enormous expanse of literature, and history, over a great range of cultures, East and West, North and South. His voice remained the same: engagingly chatty, effortlessly well-informed, always interested in the human side of books and histories, a side he rendered in the form of chronological narratives, none more gripping and interesting than those deft ...”

“... it showed how weak political Britishness has become. The old gap in attitudes between the North of England and the wealthy, pampered South-East is widening. As for the future of the Anglo-Scottish Union, the difficulty is to find anyone who cares strongly about it, especially south of the border. Once, the Union seemed a mighty pillar supporting ...”

“... the national media lose interest the local papers will start. Already the Journal is ringing round North-East MPs asking us to volunteer our expense claims, so they can trawl through them at leisure, picking us off one by one. 13 May. Payback time. A bidding war has broken out between the main parties to see who can display more repentance. Cameron (who has ...”

“... Afew years ago​ Susan Neiman published an article titled ‘History and Guilt’, which asked whether America can ‘face up to the terrible reality of slavery in the way that Germany has faced up to the Holocaust’. Her new book tries to answer that question, considering the ways in which the US can learn from Germany’s Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit, its ‘working through the past ...”

“... as a volume in 1988, and now expanded and updated to include Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison and Susan Sontag, Margaret Atwood remarks that the writers have been brought together ‘over what, in some cases, would be their dead bodies’. Dorothy Parker, for instance, says she is ‘a feminist, and God knows I’m loyal to my sex ... But when we paraded ...”

“... monster’. Salman Rushdie nominated him ‘International Moron of the Year’ for 1999. Susan Sontag said that there were many many people who would never pick up one of his books again. Presenting the matter in the starkest possible terms, the human rights worker and novelist Jonathan Littell remarked in 2008: When a family is sitting in its house ...”

“... fragment is of the unfinished novel Sanditon. Another substantial fragment is the early Lady Susan, and a third is The Watsons, also abandoned in manuscript. In addition to line-by-line transcriptions which add to the bulk of the book and may not be much consulted, except by future editors (if one can imagine the need for them), there are some prayers of ...”