“... stayed there, but he was determined to distinguish himself. Cranborne was quite the opposite. By May 1915 he had developed ringing noises in one ear which saw him invalided home. While Crookshank and Macmillan, who had both been seriously injured, were being passed ready to return to the front line, Cranborne was passed fit only for ‘light duties’, which ...”

“... would hardly have recovered from Ralph yet – as I am sure I haven’t.’ ‘We all … hope it may be the last time we will have to send you congratulations on such an occasion,’ Lady Grant wrote back to her daughter with some impatience after James, number 13. Why, given their intelligence and scientific pragmatism, the Stracheys did not control their ...”

“... the aim of the house was to ‘open a window to Europe and the world’. So a kind of xenophobia may explain the harsh treatment meted out to Calder, Maschler and (to a lesser extent) Blond’s memoirs. A more likely irritant is the pushiness of young men in a hurry. Maschler was lucky to arrive on the scene on the eve of the 1960s, a decade friendly to ...”

“... to. ‘I see this as a fairly normal state of mind,’ her note read. Occasionally, the stories may threaten to fall into feminist complaint or cliché, but Munro avoids this by sticking to the personal experience of her rebel female protagonists. Even Flora in ‘Friend of My Youth’, a spinster who represents all that the narrator abhors and has fought ...”

“... Gypsy curses and bolts of lightning, and no one for a moment can have believed it to be true. ‘I may observe,’ Ainsworth wrote in the preface to the fourth edition (the one I have used), ‘that I have not, as yet, been able to obtain satisfactory evidence that the extraordinary equestrian feat, attributed to him by oral tradition, and detailed in this ...”

“... I write as I type, or I type as I write (do cats eat bats or do bats eat cats?). ‘Whatever they may do,’ the bibliographer Roger Stoddard has noted, ‘authors do not write books.’ Leah Price and Pamela Thurschwell take up the distinction and declare that their volume will focus ‘on the representation, self-representation and non-representation, in ...”

“... three-mile mountain of buckwheat oats? Figuratively, and psychoanalytically, this porridge-gorger may be said to have eaten or imbibed the world. As Bakhtin observes in his study of Rabelais: ‘The encounter of man with the world, which takes place inside the open, biting, rending, chewing mouth, is one of the most … important objects of human thought and ...”

“... trip abroad. I left it to my brother in Mexico. We got up​ at five in the morning, it was 10 May, the birds were twittering for all they were worth. There were ten of us, with shovels and mattocks. We were issued with rubber boots, descended into Herr Jampoller’s cellar, broke down a nailed-up door, and found ourselves at the beginning of our ...”

“... later became vice-president of Bir Zeit University on the West Bank, died at the age of 72 on 23 May in his Ramallah home, after a long illness. I learned of his death as I was walking out of Tel Aviv airport on my way to see him. He was my oldest and dearest friend, remarkable as an introspective thinker and a charismatic political teacher and leader, whose ...”

“... a method used to some effect during the Banda years, when open criticism was impossible. It may be that Mdala, with his endless, deferential ‘Your Honorable Honorable Excellency’ etc, was employing a tried and tested tactic. But Gordon Mdala says that his father was intensely loyal to the British, though he did get frustrated with them. ‘Over ...”

“... he provides several explanations. The most fascinating is his suggestion that Alberti’s silence may have been deliberate, derived from the rhetorical handbooks on which much of his theory was based. Quintilian claims that while the dispositio or plan of a speech is of crucial importance, one can’t always stick to precise rules because every ...”

“... revolvers. It’s at least twenty to one that the guy who’s really hired Suggett is Mugabe. They may even hope to trigger a shoot-out with the present team of bodyguards. This is just what Mugabe needs to dramatise his claim that Morgan is trying to kill him. He’ll point to a whole big conspiracy with right-wing South African whites and then he can lock ...”

“... Court; and they would be foolish anyway not to do so, since non-compliant court decisions may put the UK in breach of its international obligation to observe the Convention. Even so, on such issues as enforced self-incrimination the UK courts have begun to plough a deviant and – as I have argued in the LRB (7 March) – welcome furrow. But it became ...”

“... hard to tell. The middle-aged literary grandees who took him up were all university-educated and may have found Barker’s unschooled eloquence refreshingly different, or simply been stunned by his confidence and good looks. Alanna Autumnal, published in 1933, contained a characteristic piece of bravado, citing under ‘By the Same Author’ one as yet ...”

“... themselves know better. It’s not because substance X produces an effect on pathology Y that one may conclude that the substance acts specifically on the cause of Y. No one would think to say, for example, that aspirin is an ‘anti-flu’ medication on the pretext that it relieves flu symptoms, or that whisky is an ‘antidepressant’ because it lifts your ...”