“... assumed to be shallowness or pretence, is probably what puts people off, although a simpler reason may be that Tarantino’s characters swear all the time – there are even more motherfuckers here than in Miles Davis’s autobiography – and are more or less impossible to understand. Tarantino has come to be seen as a kind of Post-Modern primitive, neither ...”

“... had been present when Mandelstam was first arrested, in 1934. The second time was on the first of May 1938. Ehrenburg was wrong: the correct date of death was 27 December 1938. Nadya had even been sent a letter, which was most unusual. She also had a letter from Osya from the camp. (That scrap of paper is now a few hundred yards from where I sit, in the ...”

“... of Anglo-Indians to the later poem, ‘A Charm’: Take of English earth as much As either hand may rightly clutch. In the taking of it breathe Prayer for all who lie beneath. Not the great, nor well-bespoke, But the mere uncounted folk Of whose life and death is none Report or lamentation. When T.S. Eliot, in the course of an essay of fine ...”

“... of some power, if no precise focus. Our own experience of so-called ‘football violence’ may well interest future historians on this basis. But Patterson argues that it was not until after the Midlands Rising of 1607 ‘that Shakespeare was forced to admit that the popular voice had grievances that the popular theatre could no longer express ...”

“... argument is that defensible ethical claims can be made on both sides. In many scenarios, there may not be one single right course of action, but incompatible yet equally valid stances. In the tradition of virtue ethics, as derived from Aristotle, some moral dilemmas are ‘tragic’. They occur when two agents largely agree on the virtues relevant to a ...”

“... been put on them to stall the damage done by not having used steroids with the radiotherapy. They may slow down the infections, but have hideous side-effects; within three weeks of taking a ‘very moderate dose, of the weakest steroid they make’, my weight had shot from eight stone to eleven stone. Fat that feels as if my body has been stuffed with some ...”

“... reasons, it takes a lot of watching to make sure that one of them doesn’t slide sideways.May I also remark that, as a literary critic, I can claim the dismal eminence of being the only expert on the subject of ‘A is B’ [see The Structure of Complex Words], so that being actually set to tell the Queen that she is a Goddess appeared to me a ...”

“... The effect of modernising pace and diction is a great gain in readability, but what is lost may be more important in this context. Here is Moore trying to reassure Cahun that her importance will sooner or later be recognised: We were living in an era when women’s voices were only just beginning to be heard, I said. It was a profound shift, and society ...”

“... distract him from his misery. The chronology at the back of the book records such key events as (May 1935) ‘HR beaten up visiting dockworkers; burns MSS’ and (October 1946) ‘Burns MSS; murders puppy’. He was born in 1906 in Tysmenitz: now in Ukraine, it was a Polish town until 1772 when it was absorbed by the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Roth’s ...”

“... every position that he occupied after completing his education, something of his intransigence may be glimpsed. Several of his students are on record as having been the butt of his arrogance and impatience. His relationships with the various feudal patrons and clerical higher-ups to whom he reports invariably reach a point of sometimes violent ...”

“... of indifference and responsibility, the civic ‘created equal’ and the unpayable debt it may impose, now and here: crashing, the wave deposits its gift: difference: indifference: and the long sepulchre: identity: open: meanwhile in the arms of elsewhere: someone has pushed the rock aside: I see the loan: I see its terms (maybe): I see the ...”

“... becoming competitive with low-wage developing countries,’ Greenspan writes. ‘The United States may continue to lose manufacturing jobs but not manufacturing business.’ In the past, a belief that ‘discharging people’ was ‘an unsavoury activity’ occasionally inhibited cost-saving investments in labour-saving technology; but ‘a major increase in ...”

“... these writings are in pencil, a pencil, Jen Bervin surmises in her introduction, that Dickinson may well have kept in the pocket of her famous white dress. Dickinson’s ‘one surviving dress has a large external pocket on the right side, where her hand would fall easily at rest’. The ‘economy’, Bervin continues, ‘of the pocket is worth ...”

“... Union army. Should Lincoln’s generals return slaves to their owners, as federal law required? In May 1861, Butler declined the request of a Confederate commander for the return of three escaped slaves. When informed that he was in violation of the Fugitive Slave Act, Butler politely replied that the Act ‘did not affect a foreign country, which Virginia ...”

“... me to the airport,’ he told the Telegraph, ‘I just want to get back to the US’ – may have lost him some of his audience among right-wing broadsheets and tabloids in this country. But the anchors of America’s cable news networks remain deferential. And Michael Gove, one of the Tories’ me-too neocons, has enlisted him to help devise a new ...”