“... of sombre majesty. Yet it seems to me substantially a failure or a defeat. Some of the reasons may perhaps be glimpsed in what the novelist said to Jonathan Raban (the New Review, 1974): I believe that this charade-quality of society has been present since the 18th century. Ever since society has been so poised on the cataclysmic edges, there’s been a ...”

“... taxonomy, though anything but new, is stated with new clarity and order. Jargon from any source may be found in one of three forms: shop talk, show talk, and sales talk. The historical passage of a word or phrase from restricted exactitude, through metaphor to common language, and then, as jargon, to a death by evacuation of meaning will he shown by the ...”

“... richer, more intimate affair than, say, proportional representation; but the post-colonial critic Robert Young has recently reminded us of just what racist, imperial baggage this apparently suggestive notion carries with it from the anthropologising 19th century. Jacqueline Rose has her own suspicions of that brand of literary politics for which culture is ...”

“... Alemannische Gedichte, which became very famous, earning him the reputation of a sort of German Robert Burns. Goethe admired the poems greatly, and Jean Paul declared he never tired of reading them. Thus when he took on the editorship of the Rheinländische Hausfreund he was already known as a writer; and soon the almanac was being read, and items being ...”

“... contexts, constitute the first-time reader’s most familiar point of entry. Such moments may also provide their most compelling inducements to read on: No resolve about places, the latch-key to our drifting lives, seems relevant without this smallest notion of dust. How to purge the dismal objection to this, remains a question. Not to be ...”

“... that flower gardens engage his spare time thought.’ There are no blooms actually visible. In May 1915, the Illustrated London News published a full-page drawing entitled ‘Beauty and War’. A sign that reads ‘Regent Street’ has been nailed to a blackened tree, and in the foreground two soldiers tend a pair of perfectly rectangular beds of ...”

“... reads: ‘According to Jo’s diary Hopper suffers from depression and frequently reads poems of Robert Frost.’ The audio tour claims that Two Comedians (1966), Hopper’s last canvas, is ‘unusually autobiographical’ and demonstrates ‘the extent to which Hopper’s work was a collaborative process with his wife as model, muse and ...”

“... watches the television screen. I watch the curtains, and imagine the swell of the water. A hotel may be luxurious; it may also be impoverished. Didion’s characters stay in luxury hotels but also middle-of-the-road establishments. No safe haven, a hotel is a cesspool that sucks the guest down into anonymity. In a ...”

“... England not many people read books. If you look around you in the Tube you may see someone, usually a man, reading a thriller by Robert Ludlum, or someone else, usually a woman, making her way through one of Catherine Cookson’s romances. On a good day there will be one person reading a novel by ...”

“... in the poem ‘producing the illusion that is was written specially for me, however well I may know that it was written for the whole nation, or for no one in particular’. The voice with personality, and for that reason with authority, determined ‘this collection of my favourite poems’. It is an incisive principle and pays off well: it makes a ...”

“... with another over a period of many years, is in fact unlikely to be repeated here. A better guide may well be Canada, which has experienced no fewer than six minority governments since 1957 and, be it noted, is none the worse for that. What will probably happen when next the Conservative and Labour Parties both fail to win a majority is that the larger will ...”

“... horse-dealers or lumberjacks. The conversational tone as she writes ‘home’ to Denmark may make it easier for the unconverted to understand why Out of Africa is accepted as her greatest achievement. Devotees of Karen Blixen have often sought between the lines of her African books and found nothing personal enough to satisfy their curiosity: a sense ...”

“... Liverpool has always been a special case in British politics. At first glance the pattern may appear much the same as anywhere else: Whig and Tory, Liberal and Conservative, with Labour intruding towards the end. The names may be the same: their significance was widely different ...”

“... defined and applied to which different philosophers respond in mutually irreconcilable ways. They may agree that liberty of conscience is a basic entitlement in a just society, while conceding that there are some creeds whose behavioural expression a just, or even minimally decent, society would be bound to outlaw. But in a multicultural society, there ...”

“... naive to take all the noise about feeling at face value, and constant exhortations to sympathy may mark its absence as much as its presence, or at least an anxiety that benevolence was fragile and fleeting. There’s no need, after all, to display notices forbidding spitting unless people are spitting a lot, and by the same token ‘the strident reforming ...”