“... Franco’s Spain remain neutral? How should we have treated France after the Armistice? And what may happen to a marriage when two people so much in love are forced to live apart?’ As here presented, the first two questions are hardly less personal than the third. We are meant to conclude for the wisdom of the Eccles line, but few people at this time of ...”

“... importance in Irish writing. The reasons are obvious, but the debt is so large that it may go unpaid. Since the early days of the 19th century, at least from Sir Samuel Ferguson up to the present, there has been a powerful interaction between scholarship and poetry which has enriched all Irish writing in English. Kuno Meyer, Robin Flower, James ...”

“... then slide into qualifications and inquiries. The difference between statement and reservation may be no more than a syllable, so that error or change is presented as being built into what she sees, as it is in the first poem here, ‘The Map’: Land lies in water; it is shadowed green. Shadows, or are they shallows, at its edges showing the line of long ...”

“... seems to have been quite advanced – particularly for a predominantly Muslim society.Some may dismiss Hoxha as paranoid, but it is not hard to feel that much of his overriding concern with security has a sound basis. During the Second World War Britain, Albania’s ostensible ally, would not even proclaim support for the country’s ...”

“... sits alongside a railway track, usually has some sort of trellis with ivy and bougainvillaea.I may seem to be making a big fuss about a small point, but this sort of idle condescension ambles through the book: when one of the crew suffers a (recurring) kidney attack, Mr Golding kindly suggests that he should be put ‘on a train for Cairo, where we would ...”

“... is nonetheless a comic triumph, full of terrific jokes and brilliantly sustained set-pieces. Clive may not have managed to sweet-talk Millicent and Pandora into sharing his paper bag, but that was long ago. He ought to try them again, because his pitch – it seems to me – is getting close to sounding ...”

“... her ‘emerging voice’, Sharon O’Brien leaves the rest of the life and work to others or, it may be, to her own ...”

“... been seized by other means. But Ratushinskaya knows quite well that nothing can be done, and that may be why the authorities particularly fear her sort. With a counterrevolutionary, or a new sort of revolutionary, you know where you are, but the KGB could only find her guilty of ‘an unenthusiastic way of thinking’. A splendid phrase that tells much, but ...”

“... political refugees. Of the Germans, many were businessmen, artists, musicians and scholars. They may have had a political preference for liberal England, especially if they were Jews, which many of them were: but if they did settle here, it was from choice, not necessity. A few straddled the professional/exile divide, like Friedrich Engels who came to ...”

“... most of which give the impression of having been phoned-in the night before publication. There may be another truth about the modern literary life in all this. A number of Stern’s miscellaneities reflect on his frequent writer’s trips abroad and in one of them he observes: ‘African life does not allow for the luxurious development of a novel; only ...”

“... the streets with a truncheon. Some of those who think of him as a perdurable pillar of the Left may be surprised by his crusty middle-class attitude to the cult of scruffiness, the wanton misuse of the English language, the vileness of the Cockney tongue (which ruled out his first adolescent girlfriend) and his hankering for a world in which every ...”

“... of Sicily. It is also possible that pasta was introduced into Italy by the Sicilian Arabs, who may have brought it into North Africa from Persia. The making of vermicelli near Palermo is described by the 12th-century Arab geographer al-Idrisi a couple of generations before the journeys of Marco Polo. Here the movements that Abulafia documents so ...”

“... sector progresses, the private sector progresses,’ contributed to society’s debate. Chongqing may not have offered a perfect blueprint, and it’s hard to know whether Bo himself was corrupt, but its architects stressed the importance of equality and common prosperity, and tried to work towards them. The Chongqing experiment, launched in 2007, coincided ...”

“... between the classes and between the sexes, but it was not especially interested in politics. This may have been a relief for the revisionists, inadvertently confirming them in their belief that the social had little to do with the political. But it made little sense in terms of the English Revolution itself. The old debates about whether the ‘rise of the ...”

“... moments between the star and class-crossed lovers (yes, them), Lady Mary begins a sentence: ‘It may be a cliché, Matthew, but …’ ‘Period’ might be thought to be synonymous with ‘historical’, but in this kind of popular fiction it is a quite separate category. Downton Abbey (like the original and the new Upstairs, Downstairs, and the upcoming ...”