“... Russia. Running parallel with the River Dniester, and stretching from the Carpathians to the Black Sea, once oil is pumped into it and ignited, this dyke will become ‘a wall of liquid fire’. Soon, the Carol Line will form an unbroken chain of fortifications, ‘a living wall against aggression’.‘“rivers of fire” to guard rOmania: canals to be ...”

“... of native collaborators, who in the eyes of nationalists were betraying their own people, like black policemen in South Africa today. A Russian who abandons his native land and settles in a hostile country is always credited with the most laudable motives, like the archetypal author of I chose freedom. An honest Soviet dissident like Sakharov ...”

“... white voices, as if they would be better able to achieve balance: Had the writer been brown or black, they [newspapers and magazines] would turn down the publicity team’s pitches, because a) they are not interested in yet another writer of colour being angry, and b) they think writers of colour are good for adding, well, colour, with immigration ...”

“... difficult to read Milton’s narrative in Paradise Lost in this way – we visualise the Archangel Michael’s two-handed sword not as the double lever on a printing press, but simply as a sword, while we see ‘chaos’ and the ‘abyss’ physically, as part of outer space. Yet Milton, the adept student of Spenser, was designing a flexibly symbolic ...”

“... last joke in 1988 when she made an appearance on Aspel and Company, the ITV chat show hosted by Michael Aspel, one of a handful of Alan Partridgesque men who for decades had a monopoly on interviewing film stars on British TV. Taylor had recently completed her second stint at the Betty Ford Centre, where she was treated for alcoholism and other addictions ...”

“... are worthy of Benjamin Franklin) one asks one’s self what one is doing in that galère.’ Michael Anesko’s strikingly authoritative ‘Friction with the Market’: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship gives a good many detailed and salutary answers in its essential account of exactly what James was doing in his conduct of his career as a ...”

“... is that their tree form is at the mercy of all comers, and we see a pair of sinners, pursued by black hell-hounds, crash into one of them (a Florentine), drawing blood from him and scattering his branches. The opening words of the next canto are ‘Poichè la carità del natio loco/mi strinse, raunai le fronde sparte,/e rende’ le a colui ch’ era gia ...”

“... at our heads and demanded that we renounce Christ. When we got home from school, our flickering black and white televisions escalated the Communophobic barrage. The FBI Story, a weekly drama, competed in unmasking disloyalty with the real House Un-American Activities Committee and its Senate equivalent under Joe McCarthy. Commies, loners and eggheads were ...”

“... at least three forms of academic study which would seem to constitute a challenge to it: Feminism, Black Studies, and Gay and Lesbian Studies. Surely the effects of feminism extend far beyond the academy’s precincts and surely feminists who actively work in the public sphere make use of arguments and slogans developed and elaborated in the classroom and in ...”

“... growing up in a tough but precariously self-respecting community which would later become a black ghetto, Podhoretz was the star pupil in the local high school, where white students felt threatened by gangs of teenaged blacks. In his 1963 essay ‘My Negro Problem – and Ours’, this early experience of feeling, as a white boy, that it is he, not the ...”

“... This morning there is a man in a short black coat running across a high brick wall; a hunchbacked fly springing sticky-fingered from perch to perch, before dropping heavily into the street. The wall – weathered yellow brick grouted with carbon deposits and grime – is enough of a barrier to have doubled in television films, cop shows or faked documentaries as the exterior of a prison ...”

“... but not by the thought of the poll tax. It happened to be the same cabinet meeting which Michael Heseltine had stormed out of, to tell the waiting press that he was resigning from the government over the Westland issue. That was the big story, for politicians and journalists alike. The poll tax became an afterthought. The press didn’t pursue it ...”

“... for the Criterion, and he was a shrewd judge of the poetry of his contemporaries. It is true that Michael Roberts’s Faber Book of Modern Verse, which came out in 1936, gave her as much space as any poet; but, even though it contains arresting things, her verse is curiously unmemorable and has not worn well. She and Graves shared the feel for a classic ...”

“... is concerned? During the 1980s, a generation of American scholars – Ron Bush, Reed Dasenbrock, Michael Groden, James Longenbach, Lawrence Rainey – set those limits by mapping in great detail the relations between the various literary Modernists and examining the genesis of their major writings. Mutual influence is by no means the sole topic of such ...”

“... but swimming trunks, whereupon ‘finally, the Vice President, Mr Garner – teeth like tiny black pearls and a breath that was all whisky – came down from the chair and said: “Senator, this boy is nekkid.”’) He enlisted in the US Navy at the age of 17, and published a novel about his experiences, Williwaw, two years later; wrote five more novels ...”