“... of being labelled. Stereotypes, however, are not always pejorative, whatever these authors may think. They write in their preface of the ways that ‘deeply ingrained stereotypes shed negative light on a wide range of populations and communities’; but the assumption that all such typecasting is negative is itself a postmodern stereotype. The Welsh do ...”

“... system and weight of values given to particular objectives. Two equivalently small and weak states may decide to comply with a particular international treaty obligation – or not – for entirely different reasons. Powerful states may also react differently. Look at the varying ways the US, Spain and the UK have dealt with ...”

“... an ancestral cousin of smallpox, has been found in Viking-era burials in northern Europe, and it may have been this or something like it that affected the Romans.As Elliott notes, the smallpox theory is largely responsible for the scholarly consensus that the Antonine Plague was a very big deal: modern smallpox killed a third of its victims – between 300 ...”

“... at and I fell in with the mood as best I could. Nowadays I think matters in the world of poetry may be changing and I long to get back to where I began. I should like to spend the rest of my working life writing as I have in this poem but it may be a delusion of approaching old age; I just don’t ...”

“... Donne, because his incandescent lines and his frivolous ones are found side by side; indeed, they may be the same lines, depending on how, or in what humour, you read them. This is true even of celebrated poems like ‘The Good-morrow’: I wonder, by my trothe, what Thou, and I Did, tyll we Lov’d, were wee not weand, tyll then? But suck’d on Countrey ...”

“... to the search for spiritual truth, this religious background deserves more attention. Pound may have turned against Christianity, but for much of his life he was looking for – and even sought to be – a saviour. Moody learned to write biography as he went along. His third volume is better presented than its predecessors, which have too many ...”

“... with certain (white) cultural and political assumptions and connotations built in, some of which may be directly in conflict with the sort of experience the (black) writer wants to convey. How can a writer’s parole (individual speech or writing) make any headway against langue (the language system)? The problem is exactly analogous to that faced by ...”

“... reader, two warnings should be offered. The opening chapter, about Church and State, may seem the hardest: begin with Chapter Two. Secondly, do not expect tidy answers. Collinson’s thesis, although lucidly and vigorously presented, is honourably complex and tentative. This is the modern manner, history with its head ...”

“... of the Craiglockhart in-house magazine, the Hydra, of which Owen was the editor, and the following May was awarded a consolation prize in a poetry competition organised by the Bookman. His next poem, ‘Has Your Soul Sipped?’, also makes use of pararhyme, insistent alliteration and languorous, decadent, erotic diction: ‘Sweeter than nocturnes/Of the wild ...”

“... but Paulin ranges widely in the 20 volumes of P.P. Howe’s complete edition, and his speculations may arm some readers for the harder climbs in Hazlitt’s work: brilliant metaphysical essays like ‘On Genius and Common Sense’ and ‘On Depth and Superficiality’’ and the demolition of the theory of self-interest and identity in the Principles of Human ...”

“... You may fear, from the title of this book, that they’ve found yet another ‘Boleyn girl’. The subject of this biography has already been fearlessly minced into fiction by the energetic Philippa Gregory. But there is no sign so far that another inert and vacuous feature film will be clogging up the multiplexes ...”

“... refers to another printer, Abel Jeffes, having ‘claymed’ the copyright on the Damnable Life in May 1592, and Greg argues that since this claim is not in the usual form of a licensing entry in the Company register, it must have been in the form of publication. Many feel that this inference is questionable, given the rapacities and inconsistencies of ...”

“... Ocean acidification, a chief cause of the Great Permian Extinction some 250 million years ago, may come to factor in the ‘mass extinction event’ – a planetary culling of life-forms with few rivals in the earth’s history – currently taking place. For now, fatal habitat loss, both underwater and on land, has more to do with local conditions ...”

“... too true to be good, painful indeed, as they clearly render acts of brutal injustice which women may expect to encounter as they live their lives. But for some of us the announcement of the truth after an era of lies and fictions is itself a pleasure – the mind, as Dr Johnson indicated, delighting to rest on the stability of truth. Both writers appear to ...”

“... in Jameson, not Mandel – is a mark of immaturity, an outworn college creed. The thing itself may grow old with us, but the term can’t be used by middle-aged grown-ups participating in the real world (that is to say, the surface of the earth, minus college campuses). The same may go for ‘postmodernism’, a word ...”