“... other people’s. She’s interested in getting this particular story right. Her prose is full of little assurances, checks, correctives and adjustments, as though to establish things once and for all, to settle the matter. ‘That’s right’; ‘it was actually’; ‘couldn’t we’; ‘didn’t we’; ‘yes we did.’ Everything is pinned ...”

“... biography to date, by Patrick McGilligan, includes plenty of anecdotes about fear, but supplies little by way of evidence of its ultimate cause, and draws no conclusions. Peter Ackroyd, however, is firmly of the Truffaut school. His Hitchcock trembles from the outset: ‘Fear fell upon him in early life.’ At the age of four (or 11, or …), his father had ...”

“... turnover of workers at Fordlandia was many times higher than in Dearborn. With a fishing line, a little plot of manioc, a pig, a rifle and a bit of foraging, anyone could subsist. The cash to buy the kerosene, matches, machetes, cloth, salt and gunpowder needed to make good this independence could be earned by brief spells of wage labour. Like the ...”

“... In​ 1948 Allan Wingate published British Pamphleteers, a collection of tracts assembled by Richard Reynolds and introduced by George Orwell. The first pamphlet in the book is John Knox’s First Blast of the Trumpet (1558), which begins: ‘To promote a woman to beare rule, superioritie, dominion or empire above any realme, nation, or citie, is repugnant to nature, contumelie to God, a thing most contrarious to his reveled will and approved ordinance, and finallie it is the subversion of good order, of all equitie and justice ...”

“... The review is unlikely to herald a new commitment to probity in public life.Cameron has said little about all this. In his only public comments so far, made a month after the story first broke, he said the size of his financial interest in Greensill had been ‘massively exaggerated’, but refused to disclose how much he had stood to make from his now ...”

“... was grossly anti-semitic. Public alarm on the subject was signalled less by the publication of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987) than by that ponderous pro-German tract’s making the New York Times best-seller list for 31 weeks. There are always jeremiads on the theme of ‘why Johnny can’t read’ or squibs like Frederick ...”

“... in his encouragement of lesser (or even equal) writers. ‘Was anybody ever better company?’ Allan Gurganus recalls. ‘Ready as he was to laugh, making James Merrill laugh pleased us like a good week’s work. And oh to be thought talented and graceful by the one person alive who was most purely both’. Nights and Days (1966) contains three of ...”

“... who can articulate human words without having a human tongue; presents a critique of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’, the story of a man mesmerised and still articulate after the point of death; and so neatly on to some illuminating remarks on the oldest documents of the Western tradition, the funeral inscriptions of ...”

“... as I folded my legs on that bridge, the moment I looked up to address some stranger with my bogus little request, I felt I was no longer part of the places I knew. I felt I’d been here for years; already I burned with resentments that normally take time to kindle. I had never been among the walkers-past, I was sure – though, in fact, I had never been ...”

“... in front of his other loutish house guests. In the film, however (co-written, as it happens, by Allan Scott, who was also one of the writers on Don’t Look Now) this episode is infinitely more disturbing. The squire, nastily played by Kenneth Cranham, turns out to have a penchant not for gentle ribbing but for full-blown black magic rituals. Parson Adams ...”

“... is also described as a ‘seam’, plausibly a place where interdimensional threads might get a little frayed. On top of the home invasion set-up and the understated sci-fi premise, there are scattered hints of horror movie, such as the unspeaking person at Viv’s birthday party, who wears an elaborate costume in keeping with the undersea theme but may ...”

“... endangered, diseased and ultimately – and this is Matthew’s point – put to death. Perhaps a little history here. It was in Bewley’s Museum over Grafton Street that I first met Matthew Sweeney. It was Dublin and springtime of 1989. The Irish launch of his fourth collection, Blue Shoes, occurred the day before a reading I was giving in the upper room of ...”

“... or heroic Steve Biko there were always likely to be several murderous Harry Gwalas, fraudulent Allan Boesaks and others who were merely time-servers or buffoons. Because of colonial guilt, because of false parallels with the US civil rights struggle, because of a bad conscience over race relations in general, many saw the South African struggle as ...”

“... anthologies appeared; it became fashionable to neglect our own work and to write clubby little essays for each other about ‘What Feminist Criticism Means to Me’. The larger world receded, and so did whatever sense of mission the pioneers had had. Gubar explains Elaine Showalter’s withdrawal from feminism in a manner I find shocking: ‘Around ...”

“... the attic was particularly sought after. ‘A really well-authenticated ghost,’ the antiquarian Allan Fea wrote in Old English Houses in 1910, ‘fetches a big price.’One of the most enterprising Americans was Leonora Bennet, the daughter of a wealthy dentist from Spokane, Washington. She married the 7th Earl of Tankerville in 1895 and moved to the ...”