“... is fast, brutal, ruthless and efficient. Anybody who has ever tried to buy a stamp in an Italian post office will know that the Italian state, though it may sometimes be brutal, is neither fast nor efficient. The only encouraging sign is that there are so many perfectly ordinary people who go on fighting. I sat in a car next to the widow of a Palermo ...”

“... a watchtower on the Bagram airfield, a mile from the Taliban lines. Ever the hunter, her idea of post-coital amusement is to lark with the Northern Alliance mujahidin who’ve been guarding the love nest and are dickering about with an ancient Soviet tank. While Kellas in the watchtower puts in a phone call to his mother in Scotland, Astrid goads the ...”

“... in order to signal its belief in good relations and free trade (and to remove him from his cabinet post as chief secretary to Ireland, after his Irish Councils Bill antagonised Nationalist MPs). For the next six years, he was constantly in demand for lectures, commencement orations, addresses to religious associations (warning society against excessive ...”

“... the dots into a coherent picture requires a broad brush and some pretty bold splashes of paint. Jonathan Culler’s Theory of the Lyric aims to show that Wellek was wrong, and that it is possible to make transhistorical claims about lyric. Culler is a veteran of the theory wars of the 1970s and 1980s, when he wrote what remain the clearest sympathetic ...”

“... is to a large extent organised around what she sees as the play’s ‘striking topicality in the post-9/11 moment’. The cover image seems designed to illustrate her point. Over an eerie, sepia-tinted image of a beautiful tropical scene – a river flanked by palm trees – we can make out the spectral form of a burqa-clad woman, her hands cupped in dua or ...”

“... in the town: a gloomy Puritan history lingers, a trace, perhaps, of the ferocious Calvinist divine Jonathan Edwards. There is also the eerie emptiness of nature in New England, the dark, wooded landscape that seems hollow, and menacing, without a history. Even the streets of Stockbridge seem empty. No one is around. They are, no doubt, in their cars, and ...”

“... and institutional needs that have no logical connection with Derrida’s philosophy. Indeed Jonathan Culler rightly says in his workmanlike book that Derrida has not dealt with the ‘task of literary criticism’ and that ‘the implications of deconstruction for the study of literature are far from clear.’ In fact, Derrida’s philosophy has no ...”

“... state capital, Madison, is 34 miles north-west and Milwaukee about 60 miles away, east-northeast. Jonathan Williams, of Jargon Press, visited Niedecker in 1962, a year before her second marriage to Albert Millen and subsequent move to Milwaukee: Miss Niedecker, I guess in her fifties by now, lives in a tiny green house out at Black Hawk Island . . . Right ...”

“... which continued till his death in 1973 at the age of 92. With the help of a privately funded post at New York University he lent his support to right-wing libertarianism, and ended up endorsing Ayn Rand’s tirades against ‘self-styled “intellectuals”’ – ‘moral cannibals’ and ‘gigolos of science’ – who mislead the masses with their ...”

“... wounding six others before killing himself. Nearly twenty similar incidents occurred at American post offices during the 1980s and 1990s, though on a smaller scale. As a result ‘going postal’ came to be used as a synonym for a berserk outburst of violence. Charles Bukowski’s butch, squalid autobiographical novel ...”

“... and self-deception. Adrian Oldfield’s eloquent evocation of the civic republican tradition and Jonathan Boswell’s path-breaking analysis of the links between the values of community and the imperatives of an advanced economy should be read against this background. They exemplify the same tentative but unmistakable new paradigm. Both are what Boswell ...”

“... abolition to their own and allied governments – Mrs Thatcher was particularly scathing. But as Jonathan Schell points out in The Gift of Time, ‘history often creates a problem whose only real solution lies beyond the pale of current political acceptability.’ Reykjavik expanded the pale: it brought the idea of abolishing nuclear weapons into the realm ...”

“... the tumultuous pop music era of the late 1970s and early 1980s, known rather bloodlessly since as post-punk. Until recently, the PiL story was one of the few about post-punk that even keen students of rock history could be guaranteed to know. For while punk has long been seen as a great cultural turning point, with its ...”

“... world feels now and the way it felt in the 1990s. The desperate efforts of Western governments, post-2008, to save capitalism at any cost have made it obvious that the system has slipped our grip. That’s why horror – which is the genre the ending of Number 11 most closely approximates – has become a more apt register to describe the world than ...”

“... what began as a disinterested scholarly donation to the world should, because of the subsequent post-imperial imperialist history of the English language, become an asset to its publishers as well.At £1500 the whole thing isn’t, compared with this and that – an academic monograph or a stall at Covent Garden – really expensive, but reviewers were ...”