“... III. Though this was not printed either in English or in Latin until after his death, the work may once have been intended as an aid to the consolidation of the dynasty into whose service he had entered. Here was one kind of political activity, besides the day-to-day work of a City legal official and member of the King’s Council. Within a couple of years ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... strong links to the power structure, but they live largely in a separate world; and while they may contaminate the workings of the state, they don’t threaten the state itself. The Russian state has broken down – it hasn’t disappeared – and at present, as a militia lieutenant put it on TV recently, everyone is grabbing what they can. (A man educated ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... they had reason to think a project like that might turn out to be for the good of everybody. It may be obvious now how wrong they were, but Gibson’s urge to remake, to deliver his own people out of the slums and into a pure, new, shock world, has plenty of wrong-headed nobility in it, and no shortage of high-mindedness. Gibson was a workaholic. He was the ...”

“... so involved in watching the monoliths of the Catholic Church and the Fianna Fáil decline that we may have missed what was really happening. Maybe if we start viewing Ireland through the eyes of marketing people, rather than literary critics, we will see things more clearly. A man called Peter Prendergast is unique among marketing people in Ireland in recent ...”

“... the mid to late Seventies, to Derridean anxieties about the metaphysical haunting of texts. Which may simply be to say that several of these poets have been around for a while, and that they’ve been interested in radical or oppositional modes. Often notions of purity and incantation (the poet-shaman, again) get the edge over the numbing mix of ...”

“... paradox of the ‘Stalinist Leader’. Lenin’s first major stroke, which he suffered in May 1922, left his right side virtually paralysed and for a while deprived him of speech. He realised that his active political life was over and asked Stalin for some poison so that he could kill himself; Stalin took the matter to the Politburo, which voted ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... historic promise. In Western Europe, by and large, the Old Left meant social-democrats. People may still vote for these parties as a pis aller, but since 1968, let alone 1989, no one dances in the streets when they win an election. No one expects them to bring about a revolution, not even a peaceful one. And most disillusioned of all are their own ...”

“... 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 the Maharishi kicking in, and then out, it would all have taken on another dimension still. You may not have remained at one with the universe, but somehow the erstwhile notion that you became it by being part of it, then all of it, and that it became you in microcosm, would have left you feeling that immense forces were in play when you tried to figure out ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... express the inexpressibleness of his matter’ (this was Agee’s own view). Trilling (and Agee) may have been right. But perhaps the opening pages, though touted as experimental, are actually closer to an extrapolation of Catholic ritual – the self-examination and confession of sin before Holy Communion (Agee was a Catholic). For he knows that he must ...”

“... enemies in France and Latin America. Yet Debray has a courageous, martial temperament, despising May 68 for its ‘absence of human sacrifice’ and regretting the rise of brittle ‘humanist values’, with their basis in ‘predominantly feminine “life-affirming” mentalities’. Non-Westerners, he feels, know better; they are closer to ‘the ...”