“... and, more important, he can see how the Right were able to steal it and make it their own.3 Kerry may be the ultimate protean man, breathing consensus, providing a listening ear, while all the while redrawing the lines of battle and survival. He is beginning to look and think like a winner, and he knows it, Bush knows it, the delegates at the Democratic ...”

“... instance, seeks its material in untimely behaviour, an old man falling in love with a young woman (May in December), as in Molière and Chaucer, a philosopher acting like a child, a well person feigning illness. But it is also comedy as a form that brings about the restoration of timeliness through the komos with which such a work usually concludes – the ...”

“... again the grisly old law of lesbian thermodynamics: there aren’t enough of us to go around. You may be the most accomplished seductress on the planet – a glad hand indeed – but the pickings are so slim (and often dim) you’re bound to end up with Ms Wrong. Witness Barney’s second big fling – with the self-destructive poetess Renée Vivien. If de ...”

“... factors – away teams are tired by long journeys, have to sleep in uncomfortable hotel beds, may be unused to local playing conditions – which means that it is no different from the other technical advantages, such as fitness and skill levels, that players bring to a game. The problem with this view is that although the advantage of playing at home has ...”

“... propaganda work. He signed up with the paramilitary SA in November 1933 and the Nazi Party on 1 May 1937, as soon as the ban on the admission of new members was lifted. Fischer had first studied theology, not history. He was drawn to the teachings of the German Christians, a network of groups within German Protestantism aligned with the principles of ...”

“... for love. The harshest judgment comes from Adriana, a dancer and dance teacher:Your Mr Coetzee may have had a talent for words but … he could not dance to save his life … This man was disembodied … To him, the body was like one of those wooden puppets that you move with strings … In dance … it is the body itself that leads … its body soul ...”

“... could I emote?Using Shakespeare to emote has been one of the constants of Pacino’s life and may well have been more important to him than cinema. Marlon Brando (his co-star in The Godfather) apparently once said that he would make the ideal Shylock. ‘How Marlon saw that in me, I’ll never know,’ Pacino notes in his memoir, Sonny Boy, skilfully ...”

“... while the pantheon casts a long, blighting shadow, some writer nearer in time, or less weighty, may provide the liberation from Literature. Eliot, in ‘To Criticise the Critic’, explains that ‘just as the modern poet who influenced me was not Baudelaire but Jules Laforgue, so the dramatic poets were Marlowe and Webster and Tourneur and Middleton and ...”

“... Thus Mann’s works were not included in the ceremonial burning of ‘un-German’ books on 10 May 1933, while those of his brother Heinrich were. In October Mann dissociated himself from Klaus’s émigré magazine Die Sammlung because of its strident editorial line against the Nazis. Not until January 1936 did he publicly attack the Nazis. ‘I am ...”

“... trays of cucumber sandwiches and tea served in silver and china. The likes of Emmet and Pearse may no longer be executed for her sake, but in an Ireland which is still conservative in the role it allots to women, ‘chits of girls’ and ‘hussies’ must wait on her hand and foot, and only get grumbles for thanks. In a hard-pressed and resentful ...”

“... to pose as a Nazi sympathiser to fulfil his many duties, he chuckled and replied: ‘Y-y-yes, I may have over-c-c-c-orrected a bit th-th-there. What’s y-y-yours?’ On his return from France in 1940, where he covered the retreat to Dunkirk for the Times and the KGB, Philby – according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which seems to have its own ...”

“... he was able to piece together. His friend from the City had fallen in with some Italians. There may or may not have been an orgy but some kind of drugs were involved which gave Tuppet paranoid delusions. He had discovered a terrible secret. The Italians were mafiosi. Their bags were full of drugs and guns and now they ...”

“... sudden inspiration, but of adjustment and contrivance. As evidence of the difficulty of art, this may seem oblique, yet the general effect of the photographs of the old Matisse at work and of the old Picasso at play (the ageing satyr with his young children; still drawing, painting, making sculpture and decorating pots) is to suggest that, for them, things ...”

“... be dead within months. He took the risk and arrived at Wilhelm Stekel’s clinic in Vienna in May 1927. Stekel practised what he called the ‘active-analytic’ method, and made much shorter work of psychoanalysis than the Freudians did. As Delany explains, he didn’t ‘sit around while his patients slowly uncovered their subconscious fantasy ...”

“... off on a dictator. The people can be cruel; our institutions vicious. Knowing this, however, may not in the longer term make any difference. It might even make matters worse. According to Freud, it is when people’s self-love is threatened that they resort to extremes. Far from being humbled, they tend to lash out in narcissistic self-defence. We are in ...”