“... propositions in the same book.’ Knopf turned the book down. Baldwin’s agent advised him to burn it. ‘When I turned the book in,’ Baldwin later said, ‘I was told I shouldn’t have written it. I was told to bear in mind that I was a young Negro writer with a certain audience and I wasn’t supposed to alienate that audience. And if I published the ...”

“... beyond the limits of permissible displeasure. And so, in his own way, does the Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke. Funny Games (1997) is a violent melodrama about a respectable family set upon by nasty criminals, much as in The Desperate Hours (1955) or Cape Fear (1962). (Both films were remade in the 1990s, by ...”

“... soon every scrap of paper that survived the purges at Max Gate will have been through the mill. Michael Millgate calls his new edition of the biography ‘The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy by Thomas Hardy’. Since he has stripped it of the thin marital disguise of his wife’s name and cleared it of Florence’s editorial emendations carried out after ...”

“... of friends helped her to smuggle her copy out of the country, and took her drafts to the desert to burn them. It is not entirely clear why a bonfire in the backyard wouldn’t have done the job, but perhaps her precautions were justified. If the secret police had connected ‘Michael Collins’ or ‘Justin Coe’ with Ms ...”

“... Nussbaum that democracy requires a strong national identity on the part of its citizens, and Michael Walzer insists that his circle of allegiances (‘spheres of affection’) starts, not with the outermost periphery, but at the ‘centre’. In a book with the same title, For Love of Country, Maurizio Viroli offers further, more sustained reflections on ...”

“... and prayers don’t help a bit Nor raise the temperature by one degree. The fire is just to burn those who don’t drown As too full of young voices she goes down. This is the finest hour of Mail and Star. The Sun especially is cock-a-hoop, Shouting commands as if at Trafalgar. Swab out the trunnion cleats and calk that poop! What terrifying warriors ...”

“... of In the Heart of the Country (1977), Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) and Life and Times of Michael K (1983), to the confessional monologue of Age of Iron (1990) and the literary-historical pastiches of Foe (1986) and The Master of Petersburg (1994), Coetzee’s approach has been varied, his idiom pliable. He has written in the voice of a repressed ...”

“... for cinematography – and the scene is much the most powerful in the film. It almost makes Michael Nyman’s hyperbolic score (the music in Planet of the Apes is subtle by comparison) tolerable. In all such scenes of epiphany (Charlton Heston breaking down at the sight of the half-buried Statue of Liberty at the end of Planet of the Apes is ...”

“... Michi was nobody is certain: a forgotten manager, an outsider, one of the chori or colonos called Michael? The other surviving settlements in the Perené Colony, Pampa Silva and Pampa Whaley, are also named after dead functionaries. In the version we hear from some of those who laboured on the plantation, all three bosses were killed by indigenous people. But ...”

“... the role of Bryan and the director kept saying: ‘More pompous, Morone. Make him more pompous.’ Michael Kazin is a fine historian who specialises in the lost causes of the left. He has written sympathetic books on the Populist movement and the 1960s. In A Godly Hero, his life of Bryan, he now draws an unexpected conclusion: defying capitalists and defending ...”

“... you aren’t going to have to look too hard for customers. Some of the buyers had money to burn and so the next-gen neoliberals got funding: they were able to set up a new network of think tanks and talking shops, they could spread the word through their newsletters and websites and YouTube channels and podcasts, and they found that someone – Charles ...”

“... to do to that house what Thady’s descendants had done to the mansions of my Anglo-Irish kin, to burn the bloody place to the ...”

“... produced hardly any result – not a single man at Stamford Bridge in November 1914 when Colonel Burn MP perhaps misjudged the inspirational effect of his reference to the death of his recently enlisted son. The ‘soccerites’ so often despised by rugby men did not always see the point of offering to be killed or maimed. The volunteering of the ...”

“... Rosa would, I suppose, have been unveiled. Unless the carbolic acid caused a third-degree burn, the scalpel slipped, the paraffin migrated or she developed paraffinoma or ‘wax cancer’. In which case, there would, presumably, have been no ‘after’ picture. Worryingly, in her history of cosmetic surgery, Elizabeth Haiken ends the paragraph on ...”

“... soldiers back from Vietnam and to Russian troops back from Chechnya. In the homelands the lights burn bright, the shops are full and everyone is dancing, while their brave boys shed blood in some hell-hole. It was not like that to return from Dunkirk to London, or from Stalingrad to Berlin, or even from Guam to Los Angeles, during the war. Everyone’s life ...”