“... asked the vice president, Dick Cheney, when the war would end. ‘Not in our lifetime,’ Cheney said. One can picture his barely suppressed smirk, a facial tic familiar from interviews. Cheney, and by implication ‘we’, had embarked on a war to outlast our lifetimes – an endless war. For a member of the ‘Vulcans’, Bush’s foreign policy ...”

“... at my Scottish primary school. I remember the blizzard around the classroom the day Mrs Wallace said it to me, a snow-scene dense enough to make the end of Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ appear like a moment’s inclemency. The poet Hugh MacDiarmid had a feeling for the freezing lives of sheep, and he resurrected, or to some extent invented, the words that would ...”

“... he took for his subject the question of value in literature. It is an issue which, he said, had tended to be lazily or discreetly edged aside over the last few decades and had subsequently returned in a new form: concerning ‘canon’-formation and institutional control of the ‘canon’. My periodisation becomes a little shaky here, for his ...”

“... She thrust her forefinger into the wound with grisly relish. One of the priests, Don Scossa, later said: ‘I could not look at it any longer.’ Porzia Catalano, another onlooker, said: ‘I turned my eyes aside so I didn’t have to look, because it frightened me.’ It was not the ghoulish jesting of Dorotea that struck ...”

“... Century articles told him everything about a battle except what it was like. ‘I wonder,’ he said to Linson, ‘that some of these fellows don’t tell how they felt in those scraps.’ He circled the project for quite a while, then wrote Red Badge in pell-mell fury. In one account he got it all down in nine days. Finding a publisher wasn’t easy but ...”

“... elite schools: the progressive Minta gymnasium alone produced Szilárd and his fellow physicists Edward Teller (who rejoiced in the initials E.T.) and Nicholas Kurti, the engineer Theodore von Kármán, and the economists Nicholas Kaldor and Thomas Balogh. They were overwhelmingly Jewish or from a Jewish background. Almost all were non-observant, some ...”

“... that she had just finished a novel and so, for the moment, was ‘doing exactly what I like’. I said, teasingly: ‘Well, in your case that probably means rereading Proust.’ Her eyes widened in alarm: ‘How did you guess?’ On another occasion we discussed Simenon. I had mainly read the Maigret stories; she had mainly read the romans durs, which she ...”

“... Place himself, worked simultaneously as a night security guard – even now his main employment is said to be ‘as a computer manager and commercial researcher’). The British Museum material looms very large in Mr Miles’s text, with consequences for the kind of story he tells. His book is chiefly a dense narrative of Place’s political activity, for this ...”

“... century (several of her examples are members of the Bloomsbury Group whose friendships can’t be said to have been ignored or used to further a theory of separate development) – and what she sees as their, more or less disguised, fictional portraits of each other. Jonathan Brockett in The Well of Loneliness bears an unmistakable resemblance to ...”

“... the lawn towards Cornell. She was holding one of his boxes. ‘I’m tired of this one,’ she said. ‘Can I have another?’ Cornell, who was usually self-paralysingly sensitive to criticism, calmly wandered off to exchange her box. Some critics have suggested that he started making his shadow boxes to amuse Robert, or that he was influenced by the ...”

“... in the 20th century alone – and blinded and disfigured many more. It was, as Thomas Macaulay said, ‘the most terrible of all the ministers of death’, and its preferred targets were children. In the past, you may have had something like a one in three chance of getting the disease and, if you did get it, a one in five chance of dying, though some ...”

“... formation. Describing the incident to the East Oregonian shortly afterwards, he said that the objects were ‘flat like a pie pan and somewhat bat-shaped’, and that they moved ‘like a saucer would if you skipped it across water’. In a report published the following day, a writer for the Associated Press used the phrase ‘flying ...”

“... the second was ‘a gloss on the word “lot” in “Whispers of Immortality” ’ (‘he said it meant “kind”, not “fate”, and conceded that it perhaps violated the diction of that particular poem’); ‘the third,’ Kenner reveals, ‘had reference to cheese.’ Hard Cheddar, perhaps? The preliminary matters matter, then, but they are ...”

“... and Müntzer (if he had swallowed the Holy Ghost, feathers and all, you still could not trust him, said Luther); the Visitor, church controller and bureaucrat; and Barrabas, the strident, truculent activist, despoiler of the Church. John King’s copiously documented and appendixed survey is concerned with a time when More and Luther and their trouble were ...”

“... us) better off, while making nobody worse off. Everyone’s a winner. It’s here that Robert and Edward Skidelsky’s argument cuts in. Their main target is the pursuit of growth for its own sake which, as they say, has become dogma for politicians across the globe: certainly ‘mainstream’ politicians usually assume that when it comes to output, big is ...”