“... form of literary and ideological imperialism visited on the Balkans. While consciously drawing on Edward Said’s Orientalism for inspiration, Todorova makes clear distinctions between Said’s consideration of the Middle East and her own of what used to be called the Near East. Both authors draw on a third academic, Milica Bakic-Hayden, to describe the ...”

“... when you write,’ his uncle the sculptor Hamo Thornycroft advised him. Sassoon himself wrote to Edward Carpenter (one of his many gurus on a variety of subjects, in this case how to live a free life as a homosexual): ‘I’m one of those people who can only learn things by coming into the closest possible contact with them.’ He was well aware that he ...”

“... slavery-free, Colony of Georgia: the trustees’ secretary, Benjamin Martyn, not only helped James Edward Oglethorpe draw up Savannah’s utopian town plan but served on the fundraising committee for the Westminster Abbey statue of Shakespeare, even contributing a prologue for the benefit performance of Julius Caesar that the countess organised in 1738. When ...”

“... scaled up, and now the building of atomic weapons would have to scale up even more. At Los Alamos, Edward Teller had already pressed for a ‘super’ – a hydrogen bomb that would be enormously more destructive than the uranium and plutonium weapons used on Japan – but the Soviets’ progress gave new urgency to the development of an American hydrogen ...”

“... pieces of information about the John F. Kennedy Jr-Carolyn Bessette marriage released by Senator Edward Kennedy’s office last week, there were delicious details of tailoring (the bride’s veil was silk tulle ‘with a hand-rolled edge’), ornithology (Cumberland Island, where the wedding took place, is home to ‘over three hundred species of ...”

“... mug: good bones, a nicely shaped head, straight nose, brown eyes, full mouth. A bit like the young Marlon Brando, in fact, especially around the eyes. In this good fortune, he took after the men on my mother’s side of the family. Me, I got stuck with the other. In retrospect, for someone that good-looking and wild, he didn’t have a lot of girlfriends ...”

“... it is not) an official biography, he has evidently depended on or even worked fairly closely with Edward Mendelson, perhaps Auden’s ‘scholar-in-chief’, his literary executor and the editor who worked directly according to his wishes. And yet legends afflict Mendelson’s work as well. After his edition of the Collected Poems, which retains Auden’s own ...”

“... searches on jihad, weapons and combat training. Sometimes those arrested were simply unattached young Muslim men who had displayed no suspicious behaviour at all. Unable to find real threats, law enforcement was forced to imagine them and to engage in what Beck calls ‘pre-emptive prosecution’ – convictions wholly or partly concocted by law ...”

“... toughness’ and wrote that he found it ‘hard to share his uncritical sympathy for nihilistic young tearaways in black leather jackets’. Alvarez also included ‘On the Move’ among the 17 poems by Gunn in his anthology. He began with ‘Carnal Knowledge’, whose last stanza reads: Abandon me to stammering, and go; If you have tears, prepare to cry ...”

“... out his cavalry sabre and, balancing it on his dry knees, told tales of the Mutiny and young captains thirty years in their graves, till Kim dropped off to sleep’. What we see here is Kipling’s subtle rewriting of history. The adjectives ‘old, withered’ naturalise the man: he is portrayed not as an anomaly but as part of his ...”

“... one day. Joyce does like him however, and I’m genuinely fond of him tho’ he’s maddeningly young. After the visit, McGreevy wrote to Yeats again: ‘Beckett wrote me about his visit to you. I’m glad you liked him. He was completely staggered by the pictures and though he has met many people through me he dismissed them all in his letter in the ...”

“... father, Jacob, was a mobile self-fashioning son of the Haskalah or Jewish enlightenment. As a young man he entered into partnership with his maternal grandfather, Siskind, plying their trade in wool, linen, honey, tallow, to and fro between backward Galicia and Moravia, that much closer to Vienna with its more inquisitive policies of assimilation. The two ...”

“... of the Teddy Boy contingent. He and Westwood relaunched the shop as Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die, then as SEX, and then Seditionaries, each incarnation associated with an increasingly confrontational look inspired respectively by motorbike gangs, the bondage and fetish underworld, and the military.McLaren had somehow gone from demanding the ...”

“... this poem and Milton’s are about the drowning of a man not especially close to the ambitious young mourner, whose grief is learned and elaborate. The Lowell elegy has almost as much, if a more rebarbative, music. It pursues a meditation on the ocean, and on Captain Ahab’s mad encounter with his whale – a matter in which the poet did not lose interest ...”

“... I asked her.‘Packed,’ she said. ‘The workers and the schoolkids, just by.’‘Where do the young people go for nights out?’ Karl said.She looked at him as if human nature were always biting at her heels. ‘You could go to Glasgow,’ she said, ‘but it would cost you a fortune to get back in a taxi. Even to get to Hamilton costs £22. But there’s ...”