“... and Daniel Webster, as well as eloquent spokesmen on both sides of the slavery question, such as Stephen Douglas and William Seward. John Quincy Adams didn’t consider it beneath him to serve in the House after his term as president. Such men offer a sharp contrast to the smaller-than-life mediocrities who occupy seats ...”

“... of themselves. Where women are incidental to the main drive of a story, Kelman is still capable of sharp, affectionate observations of the sort that feministically correct attitudes all too often suppress: ‘But they obviously didnt know this lassie who was a warrior, a fucking warrior. She quite liked wearing short miniskirts but only to suit herself. If she ...”

“... word ‘correct’ infecting the harder-line analyses. Writing to Virginia Woolf in 1937, Stephen Spender gave his unvarnished view of the Brigade: ‘The qualities required, apart from courage, are terrific narrowness and a religious dogmatism ... or else toughness, cynicism and insensibility ... the truthful live in Hell there.’ Everything people ...”

“... begins in Paris, ‘the biggest city west of Cairo’ and ‘five times the size of London’. Stephen Nichols starts his chapter by discussing a young girl, Christine de Pizan, soon to be the first internationally known female French author. He takes us through the reasons for Paris’s pre-eminence – partly political, partly literary, partly ...”

“... ran for governor of Louisiana and lost, but he won four years later by highlighting the state’s sharp economic divisions and speaking out against entrenched interests. In office, he expanded social programmes and organised large public works projects. He also bullied the state legislature, ran roughshod over the state constitution and turned Louisiana into ...”

“... various ways, and partly indeed by intimidation, as has already been suggested. But, as Sir James Stephen remarked in 1886, ‘a very small amount of shooting in the leg will effectively deter an immense mass of people from paying rents which they do not want to pay.’ This quotation, as Dr Townshend points out, focuses upon the crucial question of the ...”

“... he has become a central subject in New Historicist approaches to Elizabethan studies, notably in Stephen Greenblatt’s Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles, the most stimulating modern study of Ralegh. This collection of letters was assembled by the late Agnes Latham, who edited Ralegh’s poems in 1951. It was originally intended as a ...”

“... and cows are sacred. One case in a million per year is truly rare; it is the prospect of a future sharp increase which has caused alarm. CJD is a disease for which there is no explanation and no known treatment. It is important not to get CJD out of proportion. It is one of a suite of neurodegenerative diseases in which things go wrong with the central ...”

“... was taken by nationality (natsional’nost’ – rendered by Baiburin’s translator, Stephen Dalziel, as ‘ethnic origin’, which doesn’t do justice to the essentialist overtones of the Russian word).‘Soviet’ itself wasn’t a nationality: rather, it was the citizenship shared by all denizens of the multinational USSR, each of whom, in ...”

“... by the people who are actually re-inventing the limits of knowledge, articles which are like sharp needles penetrating the void of ignorance. To be inspired to think for oneself, it is important, occasionally, to hear the voices of people who are actively engaged in thinking original thoughts. I do not think it matters that one may not understand ...”

“... a kind of contract. From Socrates on, there has run through the European tradition the notion of a sharp division, amounting often to a conflict, between reason and emotion, in which reason must prevail as the core of our being and the prime seat of value. It has often been dramatised with the rebellious emotions figuring as animals. Kant made fully explicit ...”

“... as the recognised majority voice of the alternative. Its meagre military impact stands in sharp contrast to its wide symbolic appeal. Where Sampson wants to make the ‘revolution as bloodless and manageable as possible’, John Saul is primarily concerned with its socialist outcome.* His account deals with familiar instances of repression and ...”

“... end as a leaden drip.”’ This is not quite an empty threat. In this book people can snap into sharp focus at one moment, like Jane, and then simply melt away. So when Anne Boleyn is imprisoned and learns that her alleged lover Henry Norris has refused to clear her name, ‘she seems to dissolve and slip from their grasp, from Kingston’s hands and ...”

“... social, but not always friendly process: an inky collision of scholarship, manual labour and sharp business practices, operating under financial pressures and a hail of deadlines. The looming Frankfurt Book Fair caused such stress in Thomas Platter’s printing house in 1536 that Platter’s partner Balthasar Ruch attacked him with a ‘heavy pine ...”

“... say, Groundhog Day) than because the situation has been resolved on its own terms. Despite​ Stephen Dedalus’s assertion in Ulysses that ‘amor matris, subjective and objective genitive, may be the only true thing in life,’ motherhood isn’t a particularly common central subject for treatment in fiction. Nevertheless Phillips is working within a ...”