“... for any Soviet person who wanted to make life liveable. The Bolshevik leadership, along with its small army of technicians, scientists, scholars, writers and artists, was attempting to establish a new space-time continuum for a country of 150 million people. While it had some success in creating a modern urban culture for an aspirational new generation, it ...”

“... look, for instance, at the fact that, once they have paid a fee – the amount varies: £35 for a small money claim, rising to £1670 for a very large one, and £465 for a non-money claim – to set their case down for trial, major litigants get a court and a judge free of charge for as long as their litigation lasts. One may ask why a cost-conscious state is ...”

“... The master-pieces of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama were triumphs over small-minded bigotry, and they must now, in Empson’s view, be saved from the prim, puritanical dons who ‘think that everybody in the period reverenced Degree’. Those dons have a ‘distaste for the normal affections’ and tirelessly try to pervert the ...”

“... language because they’re bound to learn yours. The Conservative prime minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, and the man who on present showing is likely to be prime minister of Australia after September, Tony Abbott, have spoken up for the Anglosphere. In Britain, the Anglosphere is held up as an alternative way to exercise influence in the world by ...”

“... Adecade ago​ , the musician Stephen Coates was in St Petersburg to play a concert with his band. While he was there, some Russian friends took him to a flea market, where he found and bought a strange, unmarked disc. Back in London, he put it on: it was ‘Rock around the Clock’ by Bill Haley and His Comets. He held up the disc to the light and saw two skeletal hands ...”

“... hands across an ocean, to the bound hands of John Williams, a minister of religion in Deerfield, a small settlement in New England. Europe’s conflicts are echoed and mimicked in this precarious, snow-bound frontier territory. The winter of 1703 to 1704 had been a season of ugly rumour, of a defensive huddle in the stockade, of a phoney war. And in the ...”

“... the heroic couplet, the staples of English versification from the 16th to the 19th century, seem small-timers by comparison. Sestinas have come and gone. Ottava rima and rhyme royal had their day, but lost favour when readers ceased to want long poems which combined storytelling with epigrammatic cleverness. Even now, when set poetic forms are generally ...”

“... if the retail sector has been taken over by Lebanese, Mauritanians and, lately, Chinese, and few small and medium-size French companies remain (most went out of business after a looting spree in 2004), Ivory Coast still has the appearance of a ‘colonised economy’. This, for France, is the worst of both worlds: a bad neocolonial image but no real ...”

“... clerk, examining the author’s credit card in Seattle, asked him if he was related to the poet Stephen Spender. Assured of his customer’s identity, the clerk expressed his pleasure: ‘Gee, a near-celebrity.’ No doubt the status of full celebrity was reserved for movie stars and ball-players. At any rate there is little doubt that Spender is the most ...”

“... Stephen King has occasionally raised a rueful protest against being typed as a horror writer – even with the consolation of being the best-selling horror writer in the history of the world. But, as he disarmingly reminds us, there is worse literary company than Lovecraft, Leiber, Bloch, Matheson and Jackson. ‘I could, for example, be an “important” writer like Joseph Heller and publish a novel every seven years or so, or a “brilliant” writer like John Gardner and write obscure books for bright academics who eat macrobiotic foods and drive old Saabs with faded but still legible GENE McCARTHY FOR PRESIDENT stickers on the rear bumpers ...”

“... Their stories correspond, but not in time or place. Phillips’s travellers leave their small Caribbean island for Britain in the 1950s, when prospects were cheery. The white folks of the West had never had it so good: too good, or so their masters told them, to settle at menial labours. Since the publication of her first novel, Brown ...”

“... out: incentives by the Chinese government are almost unheard of at the individual level or for small enterprises; the state has not produced an official narrative about its citizens’ forays into Africa; air fares between China and Africa are not subsidised; mostly family-based chain migration prevails, with certain provinces – Guangdong (the former ...”

“... past, however, the pace of Pinget translations seems to have been hotted up by an enterprising small press in New York, Red Dust, who have not only reinstated the missing Passacaglia out proceeded to fill most remaining gaps with their stylish and relatively cheap publications. That Voice (Pinget’s penultimate novel, dating from 1975) appears in the ...”

“... by John Beyrle, the US ambassador to Moscow, who wrote that ‘police and MVD collect money from small businesses while the FSB collects from big businesses.’ But even when they amiably divide up the turf, the members of various agencies are doing so for their own individual purposes, not as part of a common project. The leaked cables also include the ...”

“... debt’. But this comparison, justified though it may be, is bound to make the deliberately small-scale character of Cooper’s achievement all the more evident. Scenes from Metropolitan Life is largely about the withering of worldly ambitions, ranging from the prospect of heady promotions in the Civil Service to the more personal goal of a happy and ...”