“... the scans, I was able to make out several more lines: originally, as many as twenty of the spines may have been inscribed. And then, one discovery abruptly transformed my understanding of the whole painting. I had zoomed in on an unidentified volume with a lavishly decorated binding. It’s a big, fat book: that’s one clue. Alongside it, largely hidden ...”

“... is of similar quality. But the Barbara Cartland streak was never far from the surface:Perhaps we may still sense the mystery of nature, listen to its song of life and beauty, and draw vitality from her. That song is not sung in the chosen spots only, and we can hear it, if we have the ears for it, almost everywhere. But there are some places where it charms ...”

“... Quinn and her parents – father a long-distance lorry driver, mother a worker at the Bryant & May match factory – had rented the downstairs floor of a private terraced house in Usher Road, Bow, a land of cobblestones, cigarette smoke, crowded pubs and crowded bedrooms, backyard privies and tin baths filled with water heated on the range. Usher Road was ...”

“... of the Chinese Labour Corps, some civilian victims of a daylight air-raid on Folkestone on 25 May 1917, in which 95 people were killed and 195 injured.)1 I guess an obsession is defined, crudely enough, by the fact that one doesn’t understand it. Even as it besets, its determinants remain opaque. (The word ‘obsession’, interestingly, is originally a ...”

“... Mrs Thatcher’s desire to rebuild the British future in the image of Reaganite capitalist America may have impressed Brian Walden, and it has certainly depressed the Trade Union movement no end: but its impact on managerial behaviour is harder to detect. Nor is there much reason to expect anything else: there are many more successful economies in the world ...”

“... back her ancestral estate of Marchbank. A similar linguistic clue suggests that Miss Marjoribanks may also have been acknowledged by a very different writer. Throughout the 1920s E.F. Benson – whose brother had lamented the decline of Mrs Oliphant’s sons – published a series of very successful novels in which a childless woman, confident of her own ...”

“... Its elliptic syntax and abrupt, verbless sentences often completely check the momentum. Yet this may well be its point. The decisive moment in the poem comes in stanza 30 when Bradstreet has now sooner invited consummation – ‘Kiss me’ – than dispatched it into the past – ‘That once.’ In the instant between these sentences Berryman is for the ...”

“... mixture of political activism and technical experiment, the Pollock brothers joined his May Day workshop. Pollock was distancing himself from Benton. Some time in the late Thirties he began to frequent John Graham, that most mysterious of all the gurus of European Modernism. Graham took him up, reinforcing his faith in unconscious imagery. From now ...”

“... politics and the noticeable failure of those once singed by it to succeed, however much they may have tried, in escaping its implications. In the rush of confession, revision, repudiation, self-advancement and mere ageing that has overtaken the New York crowd, the idea of the fearless unpublished, unimpressed and uncompromised intelligence has taken ...”

“... unique, and his dislike for his subject is apparent on every page. For the outsider the book may be a useful telling of the tale, well-written, coherent and combative, but it contains very little new information, and relies too heavily on a few secondary sources. Why did Haughey seek to import arms into Ireland and send them to the North in 1969? Bruce ...”

“... was either distanced to inaudibility or in danger of being crushed or forced into the street. This may have been due to defective vision. He was also obsessed with the directness of the route, which meant crossing busy roads at most awkward places. Seeing a car number-plate XYZ 729 he would point at the car and say, ‘There goes a perfect cube.’ In town he ...”

“... life was a function of the place of Jews in the educational system and liberal society.’ In what may claim to be the central passage of the book he concludes that Freud, the son of a merchant from Moravia who went on to read medicine, and his followers, ‘could hardly help being Jewish, for their career plan in the Viennese context was a Jewish one’. The ...”

“... Raw American chauvinism has always been an active element in Wolfe’s literary make-up, and one may doubt whether the eskimo in his igloo, the bedouin in his tent or the Englishman in his semi really lust for deep green marble floors, Tiffany glassware, five-foot-wide walnut staircases, private lifts and faux-Sheraton cabinets that roll back to reveal ...”

“... November with National Grid, when he asked it to cut its revenue by £1.2 billion over four years, may be a sign that Littlechild is getting tougher. National Grid eventually accepted the reduction – and then gave notice that it would cut 250 jobs in addition to the 500 already proposed (as well as increasing the pay-out to shareholders). It is almost ...”

“... is of snaring gods and goddesses, what do you do when you find one in your net? Whatever else may be possible, an equal relationship is not. The adorer wants to adore from below, and if denied this grows scornfully familiar. Like most players of Stephen Potter’s games, Tynan had difficulty finding friends to whom he felt equal. Either he felt cleverer ...”