“... be different from the European schemes of the preceding decades, which were launched by colonial powers to enable the transport of extracted raw materials. As the Guyanese historian Walter Rodney wrote in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), roads and railwayswere not constructed in the colonial period so that Africans could visit their friends. More ...”

“... in Hazlitt’s own outlook and essays. ‘The Example of Hazlitt’ occupies the second part of Jonathan Bate’s book, by far its longest section, and the whole literary atmosphere of Regency London, seen through Hazlitt’s eyes and those of his two critics, is alive with Shakespearean character and quotation, with the wiles of Shylock and the arrogance ...”

“... render the poem freely. In the end, the translator’s mode matters less than his or her poetic powers, which may manifest themselves in an empathy with Dante’s style and emotions, and in the handling of rhythm, forms of sonority and verbal intensity. As a medieval Catholic writer, Dante was foreign to post-Reformation English taste, not only in England ...”

“... 1768 and Smollett in 1771. Among his contemporaries, only Frances Burney was at the height of her powers. Neither Ann Radcliffe, whose Gothic romances would soon enjoy immense popularity, nor the younger radical novelists such as Godwin, Wollstonecraft and Holcroft – with whom Bage is most commonly linked – had yet begun to publish. In these ...”

“... doing something, you’ve got to shout about it. ‘It’s not about trying to ape Farage,’ Jonathan Ashworth, former MP and now head of the think tank Labour Together, said. ‘But where we have a story to tell, like on the returns figures, Labour MPs should be talking a lot about that.’The Home Office has long been called on to play bad cop by ...”

“... The purpose of hard work was not to achieve material success, but to develop the self – its powers, range, creativity and diversity. The longest chapter in Self-Help is devoted to ‘workers in art’, an odd choice for a man later condemned as the arch-philistine of the mid-Victorian generation. Granted, Smiles’s artist paints with elbow grease as ...”

“... all this aggro? Prestige, supposedly. Britain ‘ached to join’ the ‘new super-club of sigint powers, of which there were only two members, America and Russia’; ached to ‘remain one of the world’s leading intelligence powers’; to have ‘something no other European country had’; to become ‘the biggest fish ...”

“... the process and attempted to raise the fashionable into the sublime, he became less certain of his powers and therefore more servile in his copying.’ Among the remaining essays, there is a pair which hinge on West and Copley, both of which bring out the crucial importance of West’s picture of the death of Wolfe. We knew well enough that this was a ...”

“... of life during World War Two. And second, comedy also has an extra appeal – at least for Jonathan Lynn and me – when it is actually about something, in the sense that Butterflies and The Good Life are about something.Johnny and I were writing the first script of Yes, Minister at the time that I was deeply involved with Milton Friedman in developing ...”

“... were reduced from 402 to 157 seats, and then by the Parliament Act of 1911, which clipped the veto powers of the House of Lords. Between 1912 and 1914 Ulster Unionists and their fellow diehard anti-Home Rulers appeared to flirt with insurrection and civil war. The Tory leader, Andrew Bonar Law, declared in a speech at Blenheim in 1912 that he could ‘imagine ...”

“... appointees to direct civil servants was a v-sign directed at the backs of Alastair Campbell and Jonathan Powell.) The other omission is more sinister. It has always been part of the objection to Campbell that he briefed and spun against members of his own government, and that he was ruthless both in the way he rationed access and favours to the press (which ...”

“... Memoirs – had covers easily recognisable as ‘SF art’. The jackets were designed by Richard Powers, whose unmistakable paintings were usually found on Ballantine mass-market paperbacks by Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, Clifford Simak and others. Powers’s designs screamed of the ‘paraliterary’, of ...”

“... patrol exploded prematurely, killing two boys near the border,’ pipes up seven or eight-year-old Jonathan from the front row, like a miniature newscaster. ‘They died instantly.’ Cushla Lavery, the class’s teacher and the young Catholic protagonist of Trespasses, Louise Kennedy’s first novel, hates the ritual of The News and the specialist vocabulary ...”

“... published a week before the terrorist attacks, became a runaway bestseller, and the case against Jonathan Franzen and his kind of big social novel did not look so watertight. There may be something too wised-up about these novels, but interest in large-scale fiction has not fallen off after the attacks. Writers quickly settled back into familiar tracks; in ...”

“... inchoate hopes and dreams: ‘For some reason I have never lost faith,’ writes the narrator of Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve Up!, ‘not since I was a young child, in the power of letters to transform my existence . . . there is the white envelope, that glorious rectangle of pure possibility which has even shown itself, on some occasions, to be nothing ...”