“... and an absence from home of several months can do funny things to one’s sense of perspective. Reading the cuts in a provincial town in a small Latin American country, it was easy to get carried away. It seemed to me then that the impossible had happened and that the unimaginable was about to happen; and all in an ‘Irish’ case, one in which the issues ...”

“... the trials of enterprise, dynasty and corporate bureaucracy through the American 20th century. Peter Newman’s Company of Adventurers is a history of the early Hudson’s Bay Company, and here the spirit of enterprise is traced back to the origin of the Canadian nation itself. Historical narrative restores adventure to the routinised world of the modern ...”

“... closest thing to a crisis in the public acceptance of Operation Desert Storm occurred when CNN’s Peter Arnett broke the rule against showing bodies, and transmitted images of Iraqi civilians killed by one of our smart bombs. Senator Simpson of Wyoming promptly labelled Arnett an Iraqi ‘sympathiser’. The criticism even extended to Ted Turner, who was ...”

“... First there’s the characters’ behaviour. Some commentators, noting that Don Draper was reading Dante’s Inferno on the beach in Hawaii at the beginning of season six, have suggested a connection between Don’s adventures in subsequent episodes and the journey of Beatrice’s lover through the Underworld. But from the start no episode passes ...”

“... parks, lakes, beaches, clean creeks and rivers, swimming and wading pools, social centres, reading rooms, clean fun, music, dance, song and joy for all. That was our Milwaukee Social Democratic movement.’ This view of life flourished and then faltered, after a sequence of events that included the introduction in the 1930s of redlining (a sort of ...”

“... them, by showing them in advance how to read him superficially. It would have to be a superficial reading that perceived this novel as an anti-feminist tract. A good feminist book, according to one current dictum, is a book that inverts the feminine stereotype: instead of depicting women as passive and subordinate, as in current society and in literature they ...”

“... inference, in Ernest Gellner’s phrase, than in most other countries. Foucault in Veyne’s reading is more interesting, I think, than in his own writings, so Veyne can be excused for admiring him. And in any case, the main text of Comment on écrit l’Histoire comes close to being the best work on the epistemology of history ever written. It uniquely ...”

“... let’s have us honey –‘It set the prosodic pattern,’ Berryman told the interviewer, Peter Stitt, who had been a student of his a few years earlier. The interview was conducted in a ward in St Mary’s Hospital in Minneapolis, where Berryman seemed to be comfortable. He spent quite a bit of time there during the last few years of his life. In ...”

“... sort he had spent his life in search of, and also a way of rescuing his career. The problem with reading Capote’s letters and his Complete Stories is that the letters are far superior to the stories; they are better written, crisper, funnier, their world is more nuanced and realised. Of the 20 stories, 17 were written before Capote saw the news of the ...”

“... like an evasion, a tricksy manoeuvre by Coetzee to sidestep saying what he ‘really’ believed. Peter Singer, one of Coetzee’s designated respondents, was particularly exasperated: ‘I prefer to keep truth and fiction clearly separate.’ Others saw it as an effective polemical gesture, concisely articulating the proposition that ideas are always an ...”

“... figure of W.K. Wimsatt (still remembered in Oxford for his way of stalking through the Upper Reading Room in the Bodleian Library and stooping over the reserve counter in order to pick up ten books in either acromegalic hand). From this formalism he was rescued by the Cambridge lectures of Marxist Raymond Williams, who taught him not to read literature ...”

“... Rubinstein needs strong evidence to deny that Britain’s was ‘the first industrial economy’ (Peter Mathias) or that there was a ‘transformation of the British economy to an industry state’ (Phyllis Deane). The evidence he relies on comes from income-tax returns: ‘The totals for London and the Home Counties may be taken as convenient shorthand or ...”

“... talking, about speech I mean, he’s actually not so very good at dialogue (not when you think of Peter McDougall or Roddy Doyle). It’s the way people talk to themselves that he gets so brilliantly, so matchlessly. While the peripheral characters in his stories often exchange words in a pretty featureless manner, his central characters have always had a ...”

“... indirect commodity taxes on domestically-produced goods. Like some economic historians such as Peter Mathias and Patrick O’Brien, Brewer suggests that the taxes may well have been heavier in Britain than in many other European states, and may also have fallen disproportionately hard on the middling and lower classes, rather than the landed and rich. Plus ...”

“... strengthened by the intrusive editing of his book: not only do hosts of square brackets check the reading eye but the narrative is continually interrupted by pieces that give the historical context and often a summary of what is to come, thus both confusing the reader’s chronology and giving him a wearisome sense of repetition. The book that follows is a ...”