“... We go to the opera to hear people sing, not praise the virtues of silence, real as those virtues may be. Of course, there is a question about our desire for screen violence; but whatever else, that desire is not the same as wanting actual violence. In one sense this is a traditional dilemma of the Western. Gunslingers are always trying to quit and live a ...”

“... had been built and so was compensated with several millions – a real-life Ealing Studios plot.11 May. To Weston. Besides the women Mam’s room now has two men, Cyril and Les. Cyril is small and plump with a little secret smile, as if he’s sitting on an egg; Les has a bad chest and does what Mam would once have called ‘ruttles’, i.e. gargles with ...”

“... with’ the unions – which, they insisted, would mean selling the country down the river. ‘We may have to take greater political risks than we had anticipated,’ warned the report, whose apocalyptic and alarmist language meant that it stayed secret. Mrs Thatcher, Young tells us, was ‘tremendously excited by what she read’. Thereafter, the trade-union ...”

“... as a parody of, those which Achilles delivers in Book One, so that the discredit attaching to them may have less to do with their substance, or at least with any radical untenability, than with the character of the speaker and the subversive implications of allowing low persons to express such views. As Pope put it, Homer ‘rebuk’d the Seditious in the ...”

“... interesting about them. Mr Clark rather disproportionately brings Yeats in at this point. Yeats may have concerned himself with the sacred mysteries, but they were not where he saw and heard poetry. He saw and heard poetry in real life. Mr Clark concedes that Yeats developed towards a pregnant natural speech as Brennan did not, but he could have conceded ...”

“... one he needs to be felt as consciously holding back from. Likewise the Kentons’s provinciality may arouse cosmopolitan scorn. They are loved with, but not for, their limitations: and one imagines Howells wanting some comparable mild treatment for his Talberts. He had told Elizabeth Jordan, though, to convey to each author that ‘it is not expected that he ...”

“... à la Mallarmé, and the proliferation, the infinite extension of form à la Wagner and the novel, may coincide and the coincidence result in compositions of original beauty. But the two aesthetics are also very different, and a possible deconstruction of some of Boulez’s notions might begin here. For isn’t it really one thing to make a composition ...”

“... so the interest shifts to those other, less tangible sources of value whose workings may be analysed, for instance, in the advertising market. This means that increasing amounts of surplus-value have to be diverted to the end of establishing a product’s desirability or usefulness. ‘To give meaning to an artefact is to convince a potential ...”

“... failed repeatedly on the battlefield and at times dealt clumsily with domestic opposition. On 4 May 1863 General Ambrose Burnside arrested Senator Clement Vallandigham of Ohio, at his house in Dayton. Vallandigham was the leading anti-war Democrat, but he didn’t consider himself a Confederate sympathiser. Burnside charged him with treason and arranged a ...”

“... tongues, that syllable mens names On Sands, and Shoars, and desert Wildernesses. These thoughts may startle well, but not astound The vertuous mind, that ever walks attended By a strong siding champion Conscience. – O welcom pure-ey’d Faith, white-handed Hope, Thou hovering Angel girt with golden wings, And thou unblemish’t form of ...”

“... Paul, that the apocalypse was imminent. ‘The great mutations of the world are acted, our time may be too short for our designes.’ From the same premises, the Puritan strain of Christianity drew more urgent conclusions: fly from the wrath to come. Understand that you need a saviour. Repent of your sins, amend your life, while time remains. For Browne too ...”

“... kickbacks from the landlord to ensure the contract was renewed’. Extended families and tribes may try to arrange jobs for as many members as possible in a given NGO, often without the knowledge of the unsuspecting foreigners. Nowadays, it is hard to find an educated Afghan who is not in the pay of foreigners. A civil servant would have to take a lot of ...”

“... charlatan. The doubleness referred to in the title of Lennon’s ample and very loyal biography may have something to do with that: the sense – Virginia Woolf’s sense, as well as Robert Louis Stevenson’s, and Dostoevsky’s – that nobody is simply one thing. Some people write biographies, you suspect, as a way of not writing about ...”

“... of landscape or history will catch the acquisitive eye of a passing visitor, that they themselves may find favour with the high chiefs of official art and – one day – win a medal and thus be exempt from the selection process for the rest of their painting life. Almost.Huysmans loathes Salon stalwarts like Léon Bonnat (‘never has a more belaboured, more ...”

“... thing we have to fear is fear itself’: the phrase, used by Roosevelt in his inaugural address, may have been adapted from Thoreau but the sentiment was authentically his own. Roosevelt’s personal courage and confidence was undoubtedly a major ingredient in the political recovery that followed. His regular informal press conferences and ‘fireside ...”