“... off Norway with quota to spare only to get a message from his company saying that because a French vessel had overfished, the Norwegians were cutting the quota of another EEC boat – which happened to be his. The only way he could cover his costs was to take his trawler into the perilous waters of the Arctic, above the 72nd parallel.Hardie doesn’t ...”

“... counterpart in any other North African country. The abolition of the RCD signified the end of what French analysts called the ‘parti-état’. It meant that Tunisian society was heading into terra incognita, constitutionally and politically. But when the Egyptian demonstrators destroyed the headquarters of Mubarak’s National Democratic Party, they ...”

“... Dante, Boccaccio, More, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Hobbes, Bayle, Voltaire, Sterne, Diderot, David, Stendhal, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Warburg, Proust, Kracauer, Picasso and many more, each an extraordinary display of learning. No other living historian approaches the range of this erudition. Every page of Threads and Traces, his latest work to appear in ...”

“... political form. Sade, we know, mostly wrote his wank-manuals while in prison during the French Revolution. He was a man of specialised and unpleasant sexual interests, but he was also a radical political theorist, with much to teach about the dialectics of sex and power, for those who dared to learn. In Justine, we can read an allegory about the ...”

“... point I learned that Solaris hadn’t been translated directly into English, but from a Polish-to-French translation, with a result Lem described as ‘drastic’ – a beautiful irony for a book that takes as its subject the impossibility of meaningful contact between alien species. Perhaps I should wonder: had I read Lem at all?Anyhow, Lem was ...”

“... as Gilroy says, shepherding the development of Black Arts charities and the building of David Adjaye’s Rivington Place, the first permanent public space in England ‘dedicated to diversity in the visual arts’. But he was horrified, too, by the way cultural studies as an academic discipline had developed, especially in the US. It had ...”

“... out a substantial and authoritative History of Irish Women’s Poetry, edited by Ailbhe Darcy and David Wheatley. A new genealogy of Irish poetry that doesn’t foreground Yeats or Kavanagh but Katharine Tynan and Máire Mhac an tSaoi has come into view.Deane reacted promptly to protests about The Field Day Anthology by commissioning two volumes of women’s ...”

“... for the fourth time in its brief history, to prevent the resignation of the first minister, David Trimble. Just over a year later, on 26 November 2003, the much postponed Assembly election took place, with the DUP and Sinn Féin emerging as the largest parties, gaining ground from moderate unionists and nationalists. A review of the working of the Good ...”

“... pausing before they go up again, like they’re going towards God,’ says a musician quoted in David Leaf’s liner notes to The Pet Sounds Sessions (1997).From ‘In My Room’ (1963) to songs like ‘’Til I Die’ (1971) and ‘Sail on, Sailor’ (1973), the Beach Boys made music that for some of us has become a kind of gospel. This may seem a large ...”

“... in a British Empire’, as well as against fears of Catholic re-expansion in Europe and the French ‘universal monarchy’. The individuals who counted could all too easily perceive their own advantage as identified with the national interest. Saving one’s estate from creditors coincided happily with the good of Scotland. In Parliamentary ...”

“... selection of speakers, who ranged from Patrick Heron to Victor Burgin, Mary Kelly to Robyn Denny, David Hockney to Rasheed Araeen. The highlights included Lisa Tickner’s brilliant dismemberment of Reg Butler’s defence of his question: ‘Can a woman become a vital creative artist without ceasing to be a woman except for purposes of census?’ Peter ...”

“... all the seamarks and buoys. He would have to hold out of Calais as well as he could: at least the French were friendly, and they had begun sending him supplies. On the morning of Sunday, 7 August, Effingham’s council of war decided on breaking up the Spanish formation with fireships. By midnight they were ready, eight private ships packed with inflammable ...”

“... The most notable New York venues in that era were probably the Sanctuary and the Loft, home to DJ David Mancuso. Saturday Night For Ever includes some enthusiastic reminiscences of the gay scene in London: the drugs, the songs and the very late nights. The camp, glam impulses behind the upsurge in gay clubbing influenced the image of disco in the ...”

“... Tate) and Lady Catherine (1804, Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland); William Turner and Sir David Brewster (inventor of the kaleidoscope) were frequent guests; on his solitary rides in the Lakes he often called on De Quincey (then editor of the Westmorland Gazette), and visited William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy, whom Andrew describes in a letter ...”

“... more self-conscious about his methods: when he started his grand tour, he contemplated writing in French, and on other occasions he debated whether to use the past or the present tense. By comparison Pepys’s linguistic aberrations have an innocent air. It has been pointed out by David Nokes that the Companion is ...”