“... in book form in 1972, and Peter Carey’s ‘American Dreams’, a post-Vietnam satire, in 1974. David Foster’s first novel, The Pure Land, came out in 1975, and, deceptively to one side in the same year, stood Johnno, David Malouf’s first prose work. ‘It spread, throughout the Seventies and Eighties, this new ...”

“... James Fox, who was contesting Westminster in the September General Election and whose mistress she may, or may not, at some point have been. Although she was there for only a short time, many were shocked by her boldness. At the Westminster by-election two years later, caused by Fox having become Foreign Secretary in the ...”

“... images of her body, an X-ray and CAT-scan images of her spine. Interviewed by Stephen Barber and David Clark, the editors of Regarding Sedgwick, she said that she was finding it hard to ‘take pleasure in writing’, and was much more drawn to the visual than the verbal, to texture rather than texts. In her introduction to Touching Feeling, a collection of ...”

“... and according to the law of the Medes and the Persians, around the world, whichever country they may be in, ultimately they do all belong to the same partnership. I hope that’s clear.’ Well of course it was clear. The companies were completely separate from each other but were bound together. This formula has been at the centre of a long legal action as ...”

“... a conscience can be uneasy bedfellows (though preferable to privilege without a conscience). They may give rise to dislocated feelings of guilt, which can lead to a perverse envy of the deprived – how lucky they are to be free of these feelings of guilt – or a conviction that privilege is, in fact, a form of deprivation, particularly deprivation of ...”

“... that of self-regard, which alerts us to the possibility that societies, no less than individuals, may be flattered by their own lofty sense of purpose when confronted by human misery. ‘The national consensus on American history as a history of progress,’ Sontag writes, ‘is a new setting for distressing photographs – one that focuses our attention on ...”

“... at the moment is Beckett’s sanitisation of old age about which, knowing so little of Beckett, I may be hopelessly wrong. But Beckett’s old age is dry, musty, desiccated. Do Beckett’s characters even smell their fingers? Who pisses? How does the woman in Happy Days shit?21 February. When we went to see the Late Rembrandt show the other week I noticed ...”

“... In October​ 2010, five months after the coalition government took power, and Theresa May became home secretary, a requirement was brought in for spouses seeking to join their (British or non-EU) partners in Britain to pass an English test as a precondition of a visa (unless they were from an English-speaking country, had a degree taught in English, were over 65, had a mental or physical condition that prevented them from taking the test, or there were ‘exceptional compassionate circumstances ...”

“... party. If there is little that resembles a distinctly northern civil society (though this may be changing), neither is there much sign of an ‘official North’ as constructed by the state. What does exist is ‘no more than a caprice of the Whitehall mind’, its boundaries flowing around a series of ill-fated ministries and schemes. The North has ...”

“... most origin stories, this one is too telling to be entirely true; it has a frisson, as the critic David Sylvester put it, ‘at once Oedipal and necrophilic’. Although Magritte wasn’t present at the scene, he alludes to it in a few paintings. In The Musings of the Solitary Walker (1926), a man in a bowler hat, a recurrent avatar of the artist, stands by a ...”

“... by setting about it with the enthusiasm of crusaders clearing the infidel from Jerusalem. David Herlihy of Harvard derided it as ‘a silly book, founded on faulty method and propounding a preposterous thesis’, while Lawrence Stone thought it advanced ‘an implausible hypothesis based on a far-fetched connection with one still uproven fact of ...”

“... of her fright. The noir effect is a stand-in for the movies in general, and the corpse may well be Turner’s career. It’s all too much for her, and she goes off on a drinking binge, her old habit. The film is Vincente Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), soon to be shown in cinemas across the country. Pauline Kael thought it was ...”

“... On Sunday 16 May, a day before the IDF launched its long-awaited, well-planned attack on the civilian population of Rafah, the Israeli chief of staff, Major-General Moshe (Boogey) Ya’alon said it was ‘almost the last chance’ for such an operation and that ‘special conditions were in place’ for an imminent attack ...”

“... vocabulary to do justice to dramatic effect. The impact, experienced immediately by the recipient, may be translated in recollection – and all dramatic criticism is ‘recollection’ – into various thought-moulds, and it is probable that the two views of his acting derived from similar immediate experiences. I would lay great stress on immediacy: what ...”

“... she wants to fight, but only in the way her father and Joan of Arc fought. They both laugh. As we may or may not have worked out by this stage, the little girl grows up to become our adult heroine, the woman we have already seen on her deathbed in the film’s second scene. Soon after that a hand closes her eyes. The hand ...”