“... before crossing the German border. Arguably, the Stalinist regime had a chance to ground itself in freely expressed popular support rather than in fear. Why did it not take it? The mass rapes may provide a hint. As Merridale asserts, ‘there is no doubt that the men’s actions were encouraged, if not orchestrated, from Moscow.’ But she fails to ask why ...”

“... in The Sheltering Sky is to present three highly self-conscious American characters wandering freely in North Africa. He allows them to travel in search of some ineffable experience, away from the filth of Western culture, towards a strange, almost deadened sense of self. He gives them hardly any past, merely some thoughts and observations and ...”

“... brought to England from Virginia by his owner, Charles Stewart, and managed to escape and live freely for a brief period, became the subject of a test case in 1772. Was the ownership of people legal in the ‘mother country’? Stewart had employed slave-hunters to capture Somerset and put him on a boat for Jamaica. A baptised Christian, Somerset was able ...”

“... of Labour, which transformed County Hall, for a brief moment, into a place where Londoners moved freely and felt at ease. In the arts, and especially with its festivals, Livingstone’s GLC proved that culture is not the monopoly of the upper classes. Still, the facts and the folklore are very far apart. Again and again, Livingstone’s book disintegrates ...”

“... granted. Nor would it hold attractions for pharmaceutical companies since, as a plant growing freely worldwide, it would be impossible to patent. Hence, Grinspoon and Bakalar conclude, medicine today is largely ignorant of cannabis’s therapeutic potential and may remain so. They are broadly right. Take the entry in The Oxford Companion to Medicine ...”

“... Petersburg. Among parvenus from other parts of Europe, few did better, at least for a time, than John Law, son of an Edinburgh banker, who gained an early reputation as a reckless gambler, but also as a brilliant thinker on economic matters. A companion from the gaming tables, the French regent Philippe d’Orléans, brought him to Paris in 1715 to reform ...”

“... both sides of the Channel abandoned wigs and powder for hair worn au naturel. The English jacobin John Thelwall, tried for treason in 1794, cut his short in the Roman manner. A radical songster celebrated the look: ‘Each Brutus, each Cato, were none of them fops/But all to a man wore republican crops.’ In 1795 the style took on added significance when ...”

“... to the end of the spout. But the metaphor is a misleading one. If, in her letters, the words flow freely, this is because they are a very shallow stream. They chatter, flatter and flirt, politely inform or courteously withhold. But they rarely contemplate or analyse. There are far fewer letters here which directly and openly communicate at any deep level than ...”

“... real-life original context at all, and hermeneutically speaking can therefore circulate a lot more freely than a shopping list or a bus ticket. Literary works are peculiarly portable. They can be lifted from one interpretative situation to another, and may change their meaning in the course of this migration. Waiting for Godot as performed in San Quentin ...”

“... of that year, Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, Geoffrey Grigson, Michael Roberts, Bonamy Dobrée, John Hayward and Graham Greene had nominated Auden as the new voice. The six odes and the epilogue of The Orators, Greene said, justified Auden’s ‘being named in the same breath as Lawrence’.But Greene had some misgivings. ‘The subject of the book,’ he ...”

“... publishers in the 1960s. The one anomaly in Harwood’s bibliography is his inclusion, along with John Ashbery and Tom Raworth, in Volume 19 of the Penguin Modern Poets series, published in 1971. The groupings that Penguin came up with in this admirable series tended to be hit or miss. But the combination of Ashbery, Harwood and Raworth is an interesting ...”

“... proof against their leader’s displeasure. With the exception of Gordon Brown, and possibly John Prescott, no member of the present cabinet has such standing. Ministers have no power bases within the party or the country and are largely unknown to the electorate. They owe their places in the cabinet almost entirely to their relationship with Blair. As ...”

“... a chilling subject-matter fixed with a steady eye, The Witches of Eastwick through the potency of John Updike’s imaginative release. On the Perimeter records what Caroline Blackwood found at Greenham Common and in the town of Newbury, when she visited the nuclear protest encampments there in March this year, shortly before the town council attempted to ...”

“... The new select committee system was launched in 1979 with a characteristic flourish by Norman St John Stevas, then Leader of the House of Commons. MPs were ‘embarking upon a series of changes that could constitute the most important Parliamentary reforms of the century’. The proposals were ‘intended to redress the balance of power’ – as between Parliament and the executive – ‘to enable the House of Commons to do more efficiently the job it has been elected to do ...”

“... destructive of one’s personality ... I’ve lived my life in captivity, and, strange to say, a freely chosen captivity.’ She wryly remarks that no one asked her to take everything so seriously, but that it was ‘in my blood, its German component’. ‘If I get to live another time, I’ll know what to do.’ Living one’s life in captivity is a state ...”