“... quite dead at last in spite of all. Perhaps next month. Then it will be the month of April or of May. For the year is still young, a thousand little signs tell me so … Later, I watched him in the pub and noticed his beautiful wife, but I did not want to go too close to him. He was dead within three years. More than twenty years later in Paris, the French ...”

“... gives notice that it has taken up occupation. But, powerful a motive though greed at the top may be, the journalism they represent is too pervasive to be explained simply by this. A deeper focus can be found in Serge Halimi’s exposure of the interlocking complicities – across the spectrum – of establishment commentary on public affairs, in Les ...”

“... the Middle Ages, when Grimsby first began sending members to Parliament, it has sent men. After May, it’s as close to a racing certainty as you can get that Grimsby’s MP will be a woman.To​ talk about politics and abdication in Grimsby is, for most people, to assume you’re talking about Austin Mitchell, the 80-year-old Labour MP who will step down ...”

“... set a political trend which is being followed by independent Namibia and by Mozambique, and may soon be pursued by Angola and South Africa. The inescapable memories of violence make it hard to believe in the present sense of security. Entebbe Airport evokes the pointless murder of the elderly Israeli hostage, Dora Bloch; Lake Victoria those of the four ...”

“... from one’s mental furniture. A literary tyro on this side of the Atlantic, meanwhile, may well look with envy on the novelistic potential of the small-town Deep South: even that motel looks like a gift from here. The conviction that life is elsewhere is never more vivid than in childhood – I recall my wonderment as a small boy at the sound of ...”

“... parts of the country. And all the time the supposed Yugoslav capital remains calm. The military may have taken charge of the country’s politics, but there is no general state of emergency, there are no tanks guarding key buildings and crossroads in Belgrade, no martial music broadcast on the radio. That Belgrade remains peaceful while war invests ...”

“... forwards in time for the same period. The two possibilities are not irreconcilable: the period may have been very much longer than was thought (some eight centuries rather than five). But this recent evidence hardly provides a fair wind for the authors’ venture. There is worse, from their point of view, to come. The tree-ring sequence for Asia ...”

“... to express her appreciation of the honour you have done her and regret for any inconvenience she may have caused you, together with the hope that the butter proved to be to your taste.’ One understands why Rousseau should have written such a letter in response to an incident that was highly appropriate to his most recent publication. But typically, he ...”

“... slightly, as if a passing wind had brushed their backs. It was impossible to see if some signal may have been given. They seemed to have settled to these new positions wearily, as if they could barely give the matter their full attention. Nothing else happened.     Then Mars, as if suddenly galvanised by physical discomfort, like Uncle Alfred and the ...”

“... that we have to choose between good institutions and good characters. A clue to this oversight may lie in the strange picture of justice that feminists and other contemporary advocates of an ethic of virtues paint. Justice, they rightly hold, is a matter of applying universal and abstract rules. They then insist that justice must be not merely universal ...”

“... Sex plus money, plus a slick of current events, plus the small-town scene: the casual impulse may be to expect the least – a soap, a saga, a good thick book for the airport lobby, a comfortable fuck-flecked yardage of domestic aggravation. Nothing could be more systematically wrong. It is the genius of Updike that he can take a weak popular medium and ...”

“... problems of theory that might entail. But in poetry of the kind he aimed for (and here, I think, may be the resolution Davie does not quite reach) words draw that life-beyond-language into the life of the poem, rather than going out and surrendering to it. That is why, I believe, it is possible for capable poetry-readers to take the Cantos whole, not ...”

“... came to rewarding prominence during the World Cup. What is rugby for? Is winning everything? It may not look like that when you play to your strength with half your team and then lose. Before the final, however, there were plenty of voices to be heard, on ITV and in the press, complaining about those who had complained about the lack of spectacle in the ...”

“... man’s intellectual inferior’, adding: ‘her prerogative function of child-bearing may possibly involve this.’ Pearson married another woman, had a famous scientific career and in old age regretted ignoring his wife and children. Olive had a breakdown when Pearson did not reciprocate her love. She returned to her native South Africa, where ...”

“... pads about the courtyards, apartments and offices of the development on the site of the Bryant & May match factory in the East End, and chronicles its decline from megalomaniac promises about ‘the ultimate in Metropolitan Lifestyles’ to a half-built muddle crippled by ballooning costs and interest rates: a lesson for its prospective tenants about ...”