“... to a progressive theory of the audience. He suggests that ‘the reader of the Star, whose life may otherwise feel like the bottom of the heap’, sees through the parade of supposed information and recognises it for what it is, a fairly crude performance: ‘and this recognition, this small daily feat of seeing through the cheeky buggers, is a daily source ...”

“... comrades, their cause your cause. Sex, always wildly liberated by catastrophe and insurrection, may well be one of these emotional bonds obscuring the category difference between reporter and reported. But then, as the story dies down or the desk loses interest, the day comes when you must kiss these wonderful friends goodbye. The taxi waits, about to take ...”

“... not impossible, the Wirral by-election does suggest that Labour will win some sort of majority in May. The size of the victory, however, matters less than the nature of the Party – New Labour – which seems likely to win it. And we must accept the fact that it really is new. When Tony Blair assures us of that he is not, as the Tories insist, merely ...”

“... when the civilian government of Sierra Leone was sworn in. The end of military dictatorship may turn out to be a modest, short-lived gain, or it may not. In any case, it would not be a significant change, in Kaplan’s olympian perspective. Reportage can be informed by scepticism, it can probe, and disbelieve, but in ...”

“... seemed to be reflected in the angry disarray of contemporary Irish political opinion. Yeats may have wished to avoid conflict with the out-and-out separatists, and to preserve literature from politics, but it turned out that this could not be done, at least by him. He wanted self-government for Ireland, but was sure that more than that was needed if the ...”

“... he asked for the only halfway house left: ‘at least give us a salon des refusés.’ The Salon may have atrophied, but not everything died. In Salon paintings one finds the seed of the visual styles of much cinema, book illustration, advertising and, indeed, photography. Sometimes things come full circle. Eurotrash, a TV programme that specialises in the ...”

“... tunes. ‘Mother, child and the piano quickly became a unity,’ Ostwald writes, adding that this may be ‘the origin of Glenn’s future posture while playing. His need to be very close to the piano would recall the warm feelings and earlier proximity of both mother and instrument.’ Soon the child had perfect pitch, but he also developed peculiar ...”

“... fun – full of wit & originality & poetry – dashes of Meredith & even Whitman’. She may have shared Lily Bart’s ignorance of Greek, but when she reread Aeschylus’s trilogy a year after publishing The House of Mirth, the version she chose was a distinguished German translation. Having received a copy of Barrett Wendell’s Traditions of ...”

“... Australia, nobody’s favourite union, won public support beyond its dreams; the pickets and the May Day marches were enormous. According to the Sydney Morning Herald’s senior political writer, Alan Ramsey, the machinations had been long, intricate and expensive: ‘Nobody believes the Government was ever an innocent bystander in the Machiavellian ...”

“... birthmark that afflicts Smythe in the novel is transferred, in the film, to Parkis’s boy. This may have seemed an economical way to deal with two of Sarah’s ‘miracles’ at once, but it causes some irksome problems. It’s no big deal for Sarah to kiss the child: as the priest remarks in The Power and the Glory, ‘it was too easy to die for what was ...”

“... away. ‘We can’t abandon the farm,’ they say, ‘it’s been our life. The farmworkers may be terrified but they’ve still got their jobs. We’ve never been so close with them as we are now. We might still come through this.’ Between Dave, the globalised businessman, watching flower prices in Honolulu and tobacco prices in Beijing, and Comrade ...”

“... itself was losing its historical momentum. There are pages in Alison Macleod’s book where she may seem too hard on both herself and her workmates, and the USSR. ‘The economic triumphs of socialism’ might be overstated, but they were not all fables, or the USSR would not have won the war. What on earth was the matter with us all, to make us unable to ...”

“... victims, that Aslan was found dead in a car, killed by a member of his own entourage – which may or may not be true – in September 1998, and that the other pictures were removed from Aslan’s house during a police investigation. The parody of militant Islam compromised the Aslan dossier. The rest of the evidence had ...”

“... whose palatial entrances the beggars display their lucrative deformities. India’s problems may be seen as falling into two analytically distinct sets: one, broadly technical problems relating to the processes of production and distribution, to the raising of output to levels of adequacy and to creating the means whereby it might be fairly ...”

“... under the control of the security service. They began to be specially trained for their task in May. It is very difficult to believe, given everything we know about the Nazi state, that this special training could have been initiated without an order from Hitler. It was he who in March made clear to the military that the Russian war would be a war of ...”