“... Both Lord Home and Matthew are posed uneasily in front of iron railings guarding a statue of what may conceivably be the founder of the college: on the sleeve of Roy Hattersley’s book is a photograph of his proud parents swinging their offspring, in a solar topee, across the sands at Bridlington. There is no doubt in my mind which of the two authors was ...”

“... be shaken if the youth of all the world gather in tents at Vienna next August. An unexpected voice may carry more weight. There has just appeared in the New York Review of Books an article emphasising the urgency of nuclear disarmament without delay. The writer is none other than George Kennan, the influential American diplomat who launched the policy of ...”

“... with the conspicuous omission of child care. As a result, today’s housewife with young children may well be cut off from the community of other women, who can and do go out to work. Primitive domestic work, at the peat hag or furse bush, the well or the stream, had a social dimension which has today been largely ...”

“... Catullus as editor; it is unconvincing, to say the least. What of the fragments? The poems which may have been lost? Catullus’s works disappeared at some point in the late Classical period and were undiscovered until a parchment codex was found by Dante’s patron (putative but pleasing) at Verona in 1300. This copy could not have been made until (at the ...”

“... made a film about the Tolpuddle Martyrs in a revamped Tyneham), Mike Leigh (via Nuts in May), Nigel Coates, even David Mellor. The piquant list of names should convey something of the flavour of Wright’s book, and also the flavour of Purbeck as he understands its role in 20th-century English culture. Wright’s reminder of how muddled is the ...”

“... and us in the dark. The lines above are taken from ‘Nights of Poor Sleep’, a title that may imply that we are reading a product of insomnia, or that the speaker slept fitfully and the poem is a record of what she dreamed. But her poems do not establish narrative patterns of cause and effect. And, as she loiters at the crossroads of ...”

“... to make its various parts ‘click together like a puzzle’. Seen from a moving car, the memorial may have appeared to possess the formal unity that Brock sought but didn’t quite achieve.Walker couldn’t have seen at first glance, however, what for her would become the memorial’s most significant feature: water. The base of Brock’s memorial consists of ...”

“... left to us, doesn’t retreat to his literal or figurative cabin in the woods. Readers of his work may be tempted to conclude: this poet doesn’t have a personal life. That’s because what the poems give us are the past fifty years – Joseph’s adult lifetime – in terms of event, public policy and the evolution of civilisation: the Detroit Race ...”

“... They have all come to nothing. I don’t want to have her dumped, destroyed, melted, or whatever may happen, without giving you a chance to say a final word.The university failed to find a solution, so the exasperated insurance company agreed to give Diana to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which paid for her restoration. The emblem of the Gilded Age, of a ...”

“... red lipstick, she looked very desirable. We had some kind of meal, and went to the theatre – it may have been Measure for Measure at the Old Vic, a play Leavis regarded as a parable of repentance and forgiveness. Later, we got the train back to Carshalton and walked to her house. We made love again in the living room, rather more deliberately this ...”

“... to be the last time Israel bombards Gaza. Over the long term, however, the bombing campaigns may come to an end, because it is not clear that Israel will be able to maintain itself as an apartheid state. As well as resistance from the Palestinians, Israel has to face the problem that world opinion is unlikely to back an apartheid state. Ehud Olmert said ...”

“... people I associated with considered themselves exceptional,’ says Pete, the protagonist, and we may take this to mean above average or, simply, those to whom normal rules don’t apply: ‘So you work from, uh, home?’ ‘Yeah, I’m a bum,’ she said. ‘Like you, I heard.’ I figured she meant writer. Pete and his friends, all in their late ...”

“... understand you. You cannot describe yourself unless you adopt some pre-existing terms – which may make you feel as if you are writing, or talking, about somebody else. That’s true in one sense for everyone, true in another if who you think you are, and who you say you are, seems bound up with the self-erasure and submissiveness that have been enduring ...”

“... you are to support the queen. In June 1977, two weeks after official African Liberation Day (on 25 May), Howe and the community in Notting Hill celebrated an older, and perhaps truer, meaning of ‘jubilee’, going back to the Jewish Scriptures, where the yovel, a trumpet made from a ram’s horn, was sounded at the start of every fiftieth year to signal that ...”

“... in two recent columns in the New York Times. In the first of these, he recounted his memories of 2 May 1998:Immediately after the Senate ratified Nato expansion, I called George Kennan, the architect of America’s successful containment of the Soviet Union. Having joined the State Department in 1926 and served as US ambassador to Moscow in 1952, Kennan was ...”