“... must be crude and the design profoundly simplified for the maximum emblematic effect. Write John Vinnicum Morse out of the script. One old man and three of his women sleep in the house on Second Street. The City Hall clock whirrs and sputters the prolegomena to the first stroke of six and Bridget’s alarm clock gives a sympathetic skip and click as the ...”

“... of railways into spaces where they had previously been completely absent, preservationists like John Ruskin and William Wordsworth (‘Is then no nook of English ground secure/From rash assault?’). The agents of Network Rail, who are building the Ordsall Chord, can and do portray themselves playing the Stephenson role. They claim originality: the ...”

“... in its exposure of the coming land-piracy that it seemed prophetic. It was efficiently directed by John MacKenzie, but the meat of the thing is in Barrie Keeffe’s script, his intimacy with tired ground that is about to be invaded, overwhelmed, rewritten. The advent of Margaret Thatcher was announced, as MacKenzie’s crime fable makes clear, by a slippery ...”

“... The American author of the words, Anna Walker, is invoking the declaration of Christ himself (John 9:4): ‘I must work the works of Him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work.’ Good works in this general sense could be performed by an invalid Evangelical lady, flat on her back but radiating piety. There has, however, been ...”

“... on an earlier approach to the unpredictable Charles Townshend, it was William who persuaded Lord John Cavendish to ‘mention us both as fit men to be employed to Lord Rockingham, who received it well’. Edmund got his foot on the ladder not because of his own integrity but because of the lack of integrity which William ...”

“... when things look really dicey or if it seems especially impractical (in Britain an outbreak of foot-and-mouth was enough to put us off in 2001). But since that decision in 1845, US election day has never budged, not by so much as a day, though there have been wars on, and worse, a civil war, and though it has often been both dicey and impractical. The ...”

“... answer is no. The president should face some hard facts: his 3 per cent margin of victory over John Kerry doesn’t remotely resemble Reagan’s 18 point knock-out over Walter Mondale. Although 1984 marked a decisive victory over liberalism, last year’s election revealed that the most liberal candidate since Mondale was able to run neck-and-neck with an ...”

“... with which he wound up his adolescence recalls something of Kepler’s horoscope of himself: Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm, a tall, angular, dangly, ugly, fair-haired fellow of 18½, quick on the uptake, with a considerable if superficial stock of general knowledge and a lot of original ideas, general and theoretical. An incorrigible striker of attitudes, which ...”

“... practical expression’ of ‘the spirit of Dunkirk and the Blitz’. (Weight misses Michael Foot’s 1949 pamphlet on domestic reform entitled Who Are the Patriots Now?) A different kind of identity came to fruition during the Attlee Administration: new institutions were called ‘National’ or ‘British’ instead of ‘Royal’ – the NHS, the ...”

“... to sound serious but to sound serious at exactly the right time. He suspects them of impenitent foot-dragging. If they turn serious at all, they do so because the pressure of world events won’t let them wriggle out of it, although they do their best to try. Cunningham pounces triumphantly on any writer whose bad timing causes him to write about a serious ...”

“... disturb the eye and serve no useful purpose; carpets and rugs cry out from the floor to rebuke the foot that would tread upon them; and restless screens seem to topple under the weight of cramped Post-Impressionist landscapes that offer neither beauty nor illusion. The overall effect of the cases in the Crafts Council exhibition is not so far from this. The ...”

“... again. His closeness to it was literary. Paris, the city of his modern heroes, he did not set foot in. It could be said that he wanted to be a big fish in a small pond. But his closeness to Australia was literary too. Even in those fragments which one would like to think of as representing his characteristic voice, there is not much specific about the ...”

“... drummer, Robert Wyatt, his Cockney tenor cracking with fervour, once sang:I’m nearly five foot seven tallI like to smoke and drink and ballI’ve got a yellow suit that’s made by Pamand every day I like an egg and some teabut most of all I like to talk about me.The American poet Wallace Stevens liked his tea – he took to it in connoisseurship and ...”

“... of Rush’s reasonable and deliberative characters – she is venturing into the Kalahari on foot, with two donkeys, to investigate the experimental village Denoon has set up there. Tsau turns out to be a solar-powered refuge of some two hundred homesteads for poor, mainly spurned and elderly women, run on democratic and egalitarian lines, with only a ...”

“... in his dispassionate intelligence and arabesques of introspection suggests Proust,’ John Updike wrote in the New Yorker, while the New York Times Book Review announced that ‘a new star has risen in the East.’ Since then, Pamuk has been compared to Joyce and Musil, Kafka and Calvino, and almost never – a further compliment – to the ...”