“... 16 and a bit years had earned him the sobriquet ‘the Mad Bomber’. The Bomber had planted more than thirty explosive devices, favouring public places such as cinemas, train stations, libraries and phone booths. He hadn’t killed anyone but his bombs were becoming bigger and the injuries they were inflicting were growing worse. In their desperation ...”

“... into the Confucian Book of Songs. In the Modernist era, the poets, as Pound wisecracked, have been more interested in Muses than Moses and though bits of the Psalms have inevitably been embedded in poems, new translations have become the province of theologians and academics. The latest is a handsome edition, complete with the requisite red ribbon, by Robert ...”

“... ready: “An please your honour, I don’t understand horses.”’ If he had met the young groom Thomas Hammond he might have found even worse things to say about the conduct of the serving classes. ‘Never take a rebuke from your master for stealing without telling him to go to hell’; ‘If you are hired as a companion to a travelling horseback ...”

“... her business: she is challenged rather by the split between Dave and his wife, when Dave finds a more loving and lovable girl. Mrs Ruddock senior hears about Dave’s amour from her daughter-in-law. ‘The car mileage was just proof,’ says Mrs Ruddock junior. ‘I could tell a month ago he’d got a fancy woman, the way he acted. He didn’t come near me ...”

“... sees as a continuous process of creative destruction, refusing to let any obstacle block its path? Thomas Bender and Mike Davis are two of America’s leading urban scholars. Bender is a cultural historian known for his accounts of the intellectual and aesthetic life of US cities, and for tracing the distinctively metropolitan influences on American ...”

“... plays, Richard II and Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2. For all that, Shakespeare does not give Henry much more than a pasteboard personality, clearly seeing more attractive dramatic possibilities in the characters of Richard, Hotspur and Prince Hal. Historians, however, cannot dodge the question of the character of the central ...”

“... that it absorb a near-infinity of characters, events and incidental detail. Less ambitious, but more subversive, Christopher Stevenson and Hugh Nissenson seek to dismantle the system from within by producing novels which look like something else altogether: a form of experimentation which often has rather puritanical motives behind it – the assumption ...”

“... a full-scale biography of Matthew Arnold’. Since then the ambition has narrowed into something more purposive. His interest, Hamilton came to realise, was principally in the small nucleus of lyric poems and ‘a number of intriguing puzzles’ arising out of them; notably, ‘the matter of Arnold’s attitude to his own gifts as a poet: why did he abandon ...”

“... address adult son Mike’s critique re the paucity of Indigenous accounts.’Now comes something more interesting: the Pulse. The Pulse is described by our narrator, a Speaker called Jeremy, as he enters into the performance, melts into his characters and begins really speaking their lines. ‘Once the Pulse is fully upon you, here will come your words, not ...”

“... woman’s life when she is at the height of her charms and about to surrender them for ever to a more or less deserving suitor. During this period, she will encounter many examples of successful and unsuccessful marriage, but these are necessarily incidental to her concerns. Once the novel has reached its climax, the marriage that ensues remains unseen and ...”

“... Modern American writers have taken to heart Thomas Wolfe’s warning that ‘you can’t go home again.’ These days, being American or being modern or both seems to demand recognition of exile. The writer has to say goodbye to his folks at the earliest opportunity. That is only the first stage in his education in the estrangements of our times ...”

“... else’s speeches, they are dead and should not be resurrected. Moreover, if there is one thing more tedious than reading old political speeches, it is reading long accounts of how those speeches were composed and discussed. Mr Urban treats these speech-writing sessions as though he were disclosing how Milton composed Paradise Lost or Lincoln found the ...”

“... with a rejection slip. Day Lewis, it was predicted at the time of his appointment, would be much more on the ball. After all, had he not been limbering up for this honour for some years, with his clubs and his committees and his suave, actorly ‘recitals’ of gems from our poetic heritage? At my school in the Fifties, a regular item on the assembly ...”

“... twist, or are taken down to an altogether deeper level of thought. In Volume I, McCloskey and R.P. Thomas measure the cost to the American colonists of trade control by the British Navigation Acts, and end up with the figure of under 1.8 per cent of colonial income: a new low. As a price to pay for the services of British military forces, participation in ...”

“... carrying the coffin. Two older men I had seen with him were there too: the Shankill Road bomber, Thomas Begley, having been identified from dental records, the trio we had nearly filmed at the church were accompanying his modest mortal remains on their final journey. I had been waiting for them for hours, although of course I hadn’t realised I was going to ...”