“... but I can remember whole stanzas of it: ‘Sink me the ship, master gunner!/Sink her, split her in twain./Fall into the hands of God,/Not into the hands of Spain.’ The result is that, in The Safeguard of the Sea, Rodger continually gives the impression of counterpunching against an invisible and unmentionable adversary. He counterpunches to the limits of his ...”

“... The words ‘HIV Positive’ and ‘Aids’ do not appear in the poems in Mark Doty’s My Alexandria (1995); instead, they hover in the spaces between the other words, and they govern the tone of almost every poem. Now, with the appearance of Heaven’s Coast: A Memoir, we know that Doty’s boyfriend Wally Roberts was dying slowly from Aids when these poems were being written ...”

“... in this case Jesus’s appeal to the Creation stones to support his strong stand against divorce (Mark 10.6ff): ‘From the beginning of the creation God made them male and female [= Gen. 1.27]. For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and cleave to his wife; and they twain shall be one flesh ...”

“... won the Nobel Prize. Considering the scope of her achievements it seems that a convergence of the twain – Lessing and the prize, the Titanic and the iceberg – was fated, but it is understandable that the impact has been disagreeable; she cannot think celebrity is her business. Intent on exploring her own life and the state of the world in which she has ...”

“... write the cheerfully assonantal but bleak lines: ‘O East is East, and West is West/And never the twain shall meet!’ It would have been equally difficult for the narrator of the story ‘Beyond the Pale’ to make his seemingly unequivocal statement: ‘A man should, whatever happens, keep to his own caste, race and breed.’ With the Sepoy ...”

“... of Harvard. The American connection can be sensed in Crusoe, and it is wittily glanced at by Mark Twain as he rewrites the novel with a tender and mischievous irony (Huck’s account of the contents of the catfish’s stomach – a brass button, a round ball ‘and lots of rubbage’ – is pure Defoe). At Morton’s Academy, students were taught ...”

“... that carry his name but doesn’t seem to have read them, Barnum wrote a great deal. He was witty; Mark Twain was an admirer. He was also a philanthropist, the founder of the Bridgeport Hospital, and an educator, helping to found and fund Tufts University. Both as a member of the Connecticut state legislature and as mayor of Bridgeport, he was responsible ...”

“... still unaccustomed role of global superpower show a strong family resemblance. ‘History,’ as Mark Twain noted, ‘doesn’t often repeat itself; but it rhymes.’ I first saw Vietnam in November 1966, on assignment from the pre-Murdoch Sunday Times. I arrived in Saigon with a letter from my editor I could easily have written myself, and a hazy idea ...”

“... domestic servants and successful merchants.’ Spence invokes the ‘negative stereotypes’ in Mark Twain’s newspaper pieces: ‘yellow, long-tailed vagabonds ... smoking opium, motionless and with their lustreless eyes turned inward’. Twain was duly shocked when more than twenty Chinese were killed during race ...”

“... much more nearly to that of literary criticism. Her comments on Arnold Bennett’s These Twain and Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier acknowledge the presence of a medium as well as a message. There can be little doubt, however, that she enjoyed and still enjoys talking about content rather than form, and has no inhibitions about separating the ...”

“... feel as if things are in safekeeping.Reviewing the volume in which ‘The Convergence of the Twain’ was published in 1914, Lytton Strachey claimed to hear something fumbling and ‘incorrect’ – ‘but then,’ he added, ‘how unreal and artificial a thing is correctness!’ Hardy wasn’t another Eminent Victorian, but someone ‘who finds it ...”

“... way to the doubt and uncertainty of the present. It is (at least) not so clear now that never the twain shall meet, and that they represent fundamentally diverging forms of development. Other important blows to Western confidence have been dealt by events in Canada and Czechoslovakia, especially the latter. This was the central, linking country between East ...”

“... right and doomed bubble forth in Tilden in a string of sour little burps (recurring tics or tags mark many of the characters in the sequence). When the intrigues of Emma and her father involve them in their own temptations and compromises, the fictive strand comes together with the historical. Lincoln and 1876 are the strongest novels in the series in part ...”

“... point in the same words – demonstrating the impressive Zhdanovite discipline that is the special mark of the faction. All of them seemed to regard the affair as some sort of heavenly revenge for the sin of radical promiscuity; much as they have represented the Aids crisis as a vengeance on Sixties morality. The ethical nullity of these positions never got ...”