“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... unknown’ means, in principle, that an injunction applies to the world at large. An individual may become aware of the injunction and its terms only after breaching it and placing themselves in contempt of court. What’s more, the terms of the injunctions are vague and unclear: the injunction granted to UKOG, for example, bans people from ‘gathering or ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the naif a little too much. It’s not just the exclamatory mood, the run-on sentences and devil-may-care enjambment. She interweaves two centos that seem to namecheck half the poetry world (yearbook-style, again), and makes an anaphora poem out of ‘My Acknowledgments’ at the back of the book. The crowd is ever at her back: she wants to be inclusive and ...”

“... jokes, since mayflies have short lives, and, anyway, who would want to test-pilot a machine that may fly? Emphasising the vowel chiasmus in biplane/mayfly, Morrissey herself contrives a linguistic flying machine, and recaptures the acoustics in the last stanza with ‘your footprint missing on earth for the span/of a furlong, as if a giant had lifted its ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Klíma writes extremely well about women; and if he is not quite as subtle as Brookner, that may be because he is so very keen to put across his message, that what we all need is self-knowledge, humility and forgiveness. The first quality is preached by a wise psychiatrist (they are quite rare in fiction), and the other two by a Catholic priest, Father ...”

“... 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 ...”