“... for a poet who ‘appears to have been born in 1870/and schooled in 1689’, a feeling that may account for Ní Chuilleanáin’s more Jacobite tendencies. Few poets’ work has more visions of lost realms and kings o’er the water, held tight in the embrace of a history that forgets nothing without ever properly getting started: ‘no unformed ...”

“... voice, show that she is willing to carry the fashion war into the enemy camp. Women’s clothes may be criticised as irrational and unhealthy, she seems to be saying, but male dress, too, can be seen in terms of the tormenting experience of a naive boy who is forced into it. Barber knows as well as Kuchta that masculine dress is a construction of power, and ...”

“... tolerance, real democracy, liberal Hollywood, whatever a tyrannical, monolithic establishment may be supposed to be against: this is what died symbolically at Nicaea, and this is the movie’s grail, whatever the storyline says. For Constantine, in the movie, read neo-con. Although as the movie shows us when McKellen, as Teabing, goes barking mad, we ...”

“... charts to the mathematical armature of satellite cartography. At the same time, many readers may come away from Rhumb Lines and Map Wars with some sympathy for Peters, if only because of the relentlessness of Monmonier’s sallies. What is not in doubt is that this book makes significant claims, none more important than the insistence that misunderstood ...”

“... requirements. Under the revised bill, which still awaits final approval, the number of applicants may be capped at 1800 heads of household. (Malta’s population is 420,000.) A residence requirement has been added, though it is only for a year and applicants won’t have to be physically present the whole time. The opposition also successfully pushed for a ...”

“... secret police chief, Beria, Stalin finally ordered the Tatars to be deported. On the night of 18 May 1944, the NKVD rounded up more than 200,000 Tatars, including invalids, the elderly, children, women and even those who had fought for the Red Army and the partisans. Given only a few minutes’ notice, they were transported in wooden cattle cars east to the ...”

“... much their opponents want to destroy them, it is not easy to kill several million people. 22 ...”

“... result. We have been probing the idea of disguise: how writing, which serves mostly to divulge, may be used to dissimulate, or at least to withhold. Participants have been asked to think of an inanimate object and write about it without naming it. Now, as they read through one another’s pieces, they must say what objects they think their colleagues are ...”

“... her bisexuality (she lived for a decade with Til Brugman, a Dutch poet and translator), this too may factor into her interest in women, her concern not just with what they want, but what they are and can be. What other artist – what other woman? – could have written a manifesto for her fellow embroiderers? ‘You, craftswomen,’ she began, ‘modern ...”

“... promised not to count properly. Of course time can’t halt entirely. It’s a long long way from May to December, as the song says, or from Bill of Divorcement (1932) to Love Affair (1994), and you can see much of the road in the current season of Hepburn films at the BFI. The brittle bony face does get brittler and bonier, the dry voice gets dryer. But ...”

“... at Israeli border control, do people know why they were allowed through in April, say, but not in May? Last month I crossed from Jordan, as one of the guests invited to the Palestine Festival of Literature, a touring event that goes to audiences who wouldn’t be able to attend if the week-long series of readings and workshops were held in a single venue: the ...”

“... that this kind of thing will happen behind closed doors, as it currently does in football, so this may be one of the last public meltdowns of its kind. The England manager, Martin Johnson, struck a magnificently lordly note in dismissing the subject: ‘Rugby player drinks beer, shocker.’ A good line, almost as good as the observation V.S. Naipaul once made ...”

“... because it disrupts the historic equilibrium between the judiciary and the legislature. The media may present themselves as amused spectators, but it is they who have provoked and exploited the breakdown of an element in the democracy they themselves ...”

“... has a quite different relation to reality. The well-known line from Duck Soup comes to mind. ‘He may talk like an idiot,’ Groucho says of Chico, ‘and look like an idiot but don’t let that fool you. He really is an idiot.’ Aladeen is an idiot of one kind – shrewd, ignorant, energetic – and his double is of a different kind, like someone imported ...”

“... Prose thinks there is a deep misogyny in this film, and has written eloquently about it. She may be right, if misogyny is the name for what drives a movie that is interested only in its female characters – the sister too (wonderfully played by Sally Hawkins) has moments of something resembling uncaricatured life, while all the men are just stooges or ...”