“... been otherwise, given the topic, the author, the historical situation. One’s editorial finger may occasionally itch for a blue pencil, but one’s readerly eye wants to remark, to annotate, to remember and reflect on the literally thousands of insights into the relation of culture and imperialism that this book offers. Culture and Imperialism provides a ...”

“... that was like ‘a tone-poem lacking music’, he now had music itself at his disposal. Auden may have ordered himself to follow the syllabic protocols of writing for music, but his opera translations apart, there is far more to his libretti than simple adherence to the criteria of singability. In an essay from Moving into Aquarius written when The ...”

“... increasing at a fast pace, allowing employers to rid themselves of employees just as fast. There may be additional explanations for the acceleration of structural economic change. What counts, however, is the result: Schumpeter’s ‘creative destruction’ – the displacement of old skills, trades and entire industries with their dependent localities, by ...”

“... with the tyrant’s musical performances on top of everything else was the last straw. ‘Orestes may have murdered his mother,’ wrote the satirist Juvenal, ‘but at least he never sang on stage.’ One of the most striking passages in Suetonius’ Life is where he describes the Emperor’s nervousness before competition. He suffered terribly from ...”

“... when I come away there is a line of cars he’s hired waiting to take all the old ladies home. 1 May. ‘He/she died in my arms’ is an odd phrase. M. used it of Tulip, the last of her goats who snuffed it a few weeks back. ‘She was so clever,’ M. said, ‘waiting until we got back from Rome, then dying in my arms at 10.30 the next morning.’ It ...”

“... first boatloads of 730 convicts (160 female) and 250 free persons, mainly marines, left England in May 1787 under the command of Captain (later Governor) Arthur Phillip, reaching Botany Bay nine months later. Finding the environment inclement, they promptly moved a little way along the coast to Sydney Cove, site of the later city. The French had also ...”

“... network of linguistic tensions between that material and familiar, or possibly familiar, forms. We may take ‘seta’, for example, as pre-lexemic English or as common Italian, and the rest of the text sets up similar problems that call for the reader’s decision. The text might be read as a kind of ruin in which we glimpse pieces of an ancient world, hints ...”

“... The husband represents the conjugal union. He is also personally liable for his own acts whatever may be the system under which the matrimonial property is held. For Dickinson, our lives are Swiss, like watches or legal codes. Everything is staked out for us in the high-precision language of legal draughtsmanship and cultural engineering. According to ...”

“... or even chemical. Different kinds of scholars looking at crop failure in the Soviet Union may focus on its political repercussions, on what it means for the world economy, or for global climate changes, or for the ecology of Northern Europe and Asia. ‘Everything is political’ only means that to do an adequate political analysis you cannot neglect ...”

“... relation with the young darling of the Soviet establishment, and he had to escape from him, as he may later have felt the need to cut himself off from Mandelstam. But the poems are very much more remarkable than the prose. Apart from his magic Zhivago poems, which can sound like an improbable cross between an inspired Nineties Symbolist and an Old Testament ...”

“... conditions of blacks, Hispanics and the homeless end up mattering very much. Aids propaganda may have contributed something to allowing George Bush to punctuate his paeans to Reagan-era prosperity with the sickening refrain: ‘And we’re not going to let them take it away from you.’ ‘Them’ didn’t only refer to the Democrats: it also signified ...”

“... imparted a significance to ideas of identity and destiny, and a faith which, whatever else it may have been, was undeniably creative. It would be – indeed has been – convenient to dismiss Speer’s talents and to regard Schmid-Ehmen’s eagles as kitsch. Later in the exhibition we are able to see what Mukhina might have created in the streamlined ...”

“... of Revolution and of Poetry’, it prays that ‘man’s long journey through the night / May not have been in vain.’ When Gascoyne said he belonged to Europe rather than England, you can see what he had in mind, but too much of the poetry as a result seems to occupy an uneasy linguistic no man’s land, somewhere between Paris and home in ...”

“... of rum-drinking in between. (Daniel notes that in choosing the rumba the Ministry of Culture may also have been influenced by the fact that, unlike conga and casino, which are danced by everyone, rumba is performed by only one couple or one person, while everyone else watches. This makes it easier to control.) So whereas rumba had once been done by ...”

“... lure to biographers – judging by his bibliography, Shepherd’s is the tenth so far, which may be a record for a living politician. (Powell himself dismisses all notion of writing his memoirs – ‘like a dog returning to its own vomit’.) Shepherd has included a large proportion of the better known Powell stories, though he omits two of my ...”