“... be impressed by it. Less obvious, however, was the instability which finally brought it down on 1 May. The Conservative defeat was the result not of the ERM fiasco – that was merely the occasion – but of longer-term tensions within both the Party’s ideology and the country’s political system which in the end ground its hegemony to bits. When Mrs ...”

“... without cost. And Garcia Marquez does not spare us the details of these costs, however much we may be cheering Ariza on. ‘For her sake he had won fame and fortune without too much concern for his methods,’ we are told. When Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza embark on what is to be a dazzling river trip at the book’s end, we see what cost the earth ...”

“... than just to check for it.’ ‘Well, they might not be looters.’ Now he looked surly. ‘They may be getting their own things back. I found my plough in a house near here.’ ‘So what’s the point of checking for looters?’ ‘Well, actually, we’re not just checking for looters, we’re looking for war criminals and collaborators.’ All that is ...”

“... mentions in a book about DJs (more than Paul Oakenfold, Todd Terry, Grooverider, Sasha and Derrick May put together). Possibly he hopes sceptical readers will be comforted by comparisons with a rock band. It’s like the prevailing wisdom about hip hop: ‘it’s the new rock’n’roll,’ people say, avoiding the more challenging idea that it’s actually ...”

“... to go on for ever. Feeble, inarticulate, will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth, and may it burn their lousy souls.’ Nash returned to England in 1918 to resume his career as a painter: but he knew it would have to be a different career, because he was a different painter, ‘a war artist’, as he put it, ‘without a war’. He knew, as ...”

“... by individuals. The individual style is consequently cherished. Within the bounds of grammar, you may speak as you please. Contributors to any American publication at an equivalent level will know that the same privilege, however freely offered by the editor, will effectively be withdrawn by his minions. Edmund Wilson’s famous letter to the editor of the ...”

“... now directed against the Communists, whom he held responsible for the division of Korea. In May 1954 Moon finally founded his Unification Church. Moon has always made extreme demands on his followers: they are enjoined to give up everything on becoming members of his flock, and have to work long hours for no pay – engaging in a plethora of activities ...”

“... and reported to King Leopold that Albert lacked nothing in charm and attractiveness – ‘it may also be considered a fortunate circumstance that he has already a certain English look about him’ – but that he seemed deficient in strength of will and intellectual and moral force. ‘To pursue so difficult a political career a whole life through ...”

“... that is wrong with his music.’ ‘To show mastery is to be as clear and short as possible (which may be long).’ It is good to learn from the editor’s Introduction that ‘the papers in the estate contain a large number of delightfully focused aphorisms’, since this is clearly what Keller did best. Behind the specific topics – binding them together on ...”

“... I’m doing this translation is to earn money to pay bills and feed my family. Attractive as it may sound, I don’t live in a situation where ‘there is only the mind.’ There are also electricity bills, phone bills, Kellogg’s cornflakes. The world of the other, the contingent other, is unbelievably abundant and solid around here. My children eat huge ...”

“... her. She rejoined Labour in 1944, agreeing with the Party’s National Agent that ‘whilst there may have been criticism of Labour’ in her journalism, ‘there was no wickedness in it.’ Bevan had told her in 1932 that ‘it is the Labour Party or nothing ... it is the party that we have taught millions of working people to look to and regard as their ...”

“... because, as he patiently explained, ‘one cannot think of the great all the time, though one may wish to do so’; but the line, with its illogic and deft metrical clumsiness, wears its helpless embarrassment on its sleeve. How else would you dwell upon the great except weakly?‘I think continually’ and ‘The Pylons’ are the sort of poem Spender ...”

“... powerful and destitute: all his sympathies are with the ‘owl’ in the dock, whatever his crime may have been. Rather he is pointing the finger at the modern state, which forbids violence to its citizens, not because, as Freud puts it, ‘it desires to abolish it, but because it desires to monopolise it, like salt and tobacco’. For Tarrou, the ...”

“... where of them’? Was she not manifestly a writer ‘for whom places loom large’? The problem may have been that place in itself does not loom large in the novels and stories. Bowen’s North Cork is not a mythical terrain like Hardy’s Wessex. What matters, rather, is a relation of person to place – created as much in expectation and memory as in ...”

“... sweep over her and she would violently begin to spin a large gold ring on her left hand. Violent may seem too strong a word but it is not; the movement was so abrupt and vigorous, accompanied by such a gust of alarm across her expressive face, that the kids sitting at her feet almost seemed to start …She talked incessantly about ‘John’ (her ...”