“... the mark my way,’ he says: be buggered if I won’t & I know I’ll be damned if I do, for it may not be Lake poetry or Ovid or that damned dwarf Pope but it will be the best I can do and like no other has. Rough work with a soul will always be open to all, including condemnation and reviling, while fine work housing emptiness is closed to all insults ...”

“... to study in moulding their own attitudes and policies in the age of advancing globalisation. They may be unfashionable questions in today’s cultural climate, but they require cogent, responsible answers. In recent years, the most aggressive efforts to arouse nativist sentiments have backfired badly. When California’s Governor Pete Wilson spoke out in ...”

“... the sense of a pro-Hitler cabal, was the invention of the Marxist journalist Claud Cockburn. Nancy may have invited Ribbentrop to lunch, and she didn’t like Jews: but she didn’t want Hitler to be beastly to them either. As for her set, Fox points out, it included fervent anti-Hitlerites such as Churchill, Eden, Macmillan and Bob Brand, who regretted that ...”

“... of history by the action of the State. It is derived from the State, not supreme over it. A State may in course of time produce a nationality; but that a nationality should constitute a State is contrary to the nature of modern civilisation’. The ethnically self-standing was the politically and morally self-stultifying. It obstructed human evolution, not ...”

“... top-order batsmen could not resist the Australian attack. The middle-order crumbled. Shane Warne may have looked unplayable, but Pakistan’s batsmen didn’t try very hard. The demoralised bowlers, feeling the game was in any case lost, failed to retrieve the situation. Wasim Akram said that they were outplayed and there was nothing more to it. I think, on ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... discord now resolved as a tribute from Diana, her tutelary goddess. Philip Sidney in The Lady of May, the little entertainment he staged in 1578 at Leicester’s park and gardens of Wanstead, went so far as to impose an unscripted speaking part on the Queen, presumably without warning, forcing her to adjudicate between two fictional rival ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is a celebration of America’s black Hip-Hop culture and the films of Spike Lee. All this may seem like a thinly disguised celebration of Diawara’s own successful career in France and the United States, but the long, disturbing quest for Sidimé Laye tells a different story. One of the book’s most original sections is Diawara’s paean to African ...”

“... applicability. The rise of homosexuality into a more overt and articulated aspect of our lives may itself be an indicator of our arrival at a cultural state removed from the central anxieties of agricultural peoples – owning land and giving birth. Thus we now have the responsibility of making myths of our own. Our interest in films, TV etc can be ...”

“... Book 7) associate it with uncertainty (Aeneas earlier calls it ‘Ausonian Tiber’, whatever that may be), or with war and death – most memorably in the Sibyl’s vision (‘I see the Tiber foaming with much blood’). That sense of fear and awe is a constitutive element of Virgil’s Italy. By focusing on such details Jenkyns goes some way towards ...”

“... of intention, extremely limited objectives’ – was, in fact, enormously challenging. The book may be ‘about’ Hardy, but its aim is to contextualise a British poetry which, while having Larkin as its ‘centrally representative’ figure (Davie makes this prescient claim for Larkin very early on, in 1963), can accommodate writers such as Prynne 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”