“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... itself, or on its musical realisation, or even on the performers, but on what Ruth Berghaus or David Alden or Andrei Serban is saying about it. Or rather what images they are inflicting upon it – for the production of opera is primarily a matter of what something is made to look like. Singers rarely have any authentic acting ability and the wiser ...”

“... shout their presence (the radically different visual effect of the original is illustrated in David Norton’s The King James Bible: A Short History from Tyndale to Today, as well as in Campbell’s own Bible, another history of the KJB). It’s a pity, but the change emphasises just how remote the modern ‘King James’ Bible is from its original. It ...”

“... who wanted me to read verses at a little morning session for foreign poets. ‘Oh, please, Mr David. We only have one Frenchman so far.’ Foolishly I agreed to pipe up if she really ran short of European versifiers. By Easter Sunday we were enjoying an ideal English summer, blue skies and cool breeze. We were feasted, Arab poems were beautifully ...”

“... David Peace’s first novel, Nineteen Seventy Four (1999), was set in West Yorkshire in the year of its title, and presented that time and place in apocalyptic terms. ‘These are violent bloody times, son,’ a senior policeman tells the narrator, a gauche young journalist investigating the disappearance of a series of girls ...”

“... south of England, particularly London, and from Yorkshire and points north. The London emigrant may well have started his wanderings elsewhere: he is a classic case of the fact that people become migrants in mind before they decide on their actual destination. These economic refugees, mostly men, went out in small numbers on ships doing miscellaneous ...”

“... the closet. This time, however, there was no formal disbandment and since the mid-Eighties, when David Duke organised his spin-off Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, embittered white Southerners have kept in trim by linking up with one or another of America’s numerous neo-Nazi militia movements. The Twenties obsession with Catholics has again been sidelined. The ...”

“... such as Norman Stone, Hew Strachan, Annette Becker and Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau. With Cataclysm, David Stevenson draws on much recent work to provide a comprehensive account of the war, with a welcome interest both in the non-European theatres and in the home fronts. His book is also part of a more general attempt to rethink the meaning of the Great War and ...”

“... For three years​ David Blunkett, then the Labour home secretary, had an affair with Kimberly Fortier, publisher of the Spectator. The affair came to an end in the summer of 2004. A few weeks later, on Friday 13 August, Andy Coulson, editor of the News of the World, showed up at Blunkett’s office in Sheffield to ask whether he was having an affair with a married woman ...”

“... stretching upwards, but perhaps true ambition has a pair of silent claws. None of us identified David Cameron as the boy marching inexorably towards Downing Street. When he became Tory leader in 2005, I had difficulty recalling him: wasn’t he that affable, sweet-faced, minor fellow at the edge of things? I remembered him as quite handsome, with the ...”

“... for not giving any – as well as being admirably genial. After all, says Aldiss, the definition may be wrong, but it doesn’t matter: ‘we can modify it as we go along.’ The definition is as follows: ‘Science fiction is the search for a definition of mankind and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of ...”