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“... We’d left the cameras in the Hertz But made St P.’s for the tourist Passion. I knew one of the trio: permapressed, a little weary This is what he did on his vacations. A few bearded heads bled from the corbels. We walked by the pleated steps of a temple In whose maw someone was being tried with flame. We took in the long galleria before lunch. Sloan made some remark about art being vox populi ...”

“... Christmas Break We’ve floored it from London. The bridge winches up; the moat bares To green algae silk, kitchen relics, The bones of suicides. The snow, fine as bride’s Fine lace, stacks up its trousseau: A terrain in bedsheets, smoothed from memory. The town’s dead as midnight. Rushing the houses of the estate, The wind skims the roof Like a bruising hand ...”

“... informality of ‘almost’ seeks to modify and excuse the sentimental literariness of the rest. Anne Rouse, another young American with a first book, is in every way a better writer than Clary. She is civil and efficient and the only problem with her writing is that it resembles the civil efficiencies of a thousand others. Killarney Clary forgets too ...”

“... young man Shelley incarcerated himself overnight in the vaults of the local church, in order to rouse his instinct for terror to the right pitch. He wanted to be ‘harrowed by fear’. Woodward, an unashamed romantic of the same school, has similarly set himself the object of looking into the ‘feelings of pleasure and fear which ruins suggest’. The ...”

“... even if Sam has only left the US because of a girl. It is a relief to be in a place that might rouse this profoundly undramatic novel, and perhaps it is not coincidental that Sam’s few weeks in the Middle East produce some of the novel’s best writing. Sam is in the West Bank with a Swedish-led human rights group, which sends him to stay with Akhmed, a ...”

“... always obvious. In A History of Rugby School, published in 1898, the classical scholar W.H.D. Rouse tells of a housemaster weeping over the injuries of the players after prolonged bouts of hacking. Aside from this fortifying practice, which took place in head-on confrontations, mostly in vast scrums involving scores of upright players, there was a deadly ...”

“... of her forehead, with a smile somewhat like Edna O’Brien’s – another writer who seemed to rouse hatred for her disarranged hair as much as for her books, another writer who went to convent school. This is the sort of education that can unfit you afterwards for normal conversation, that can make the suburbs seem beyond your power of understanding as ...”

“... Everything was beyond me: control, escape, comprehension. Nevertheless, when my wife did finally rouse a doctor from his bed to come to mine, towards dawn, I felt a kind of perverse relief at seeing how alarmed he was by my condition. At least I wasn’t making a fuss about nothing! The ambulance he summoned came after a brief delay. Wrapped in the ...”

“... hour’ of his time. In a postscript the judge recommends the Broadway production of The Diary of Anne Frank. Question 1 is: ‘If you had been living in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, would you have written such a story?’ Question 6 is: ‘What set of aesthetic values makes you think that the cheap is more valid than the noble and the slimy is more truthful ...”

“... Long), the result – inaction and indifference – was the same. (When Eleanor tried to rouse Franklin to the plight of Europe’s Jews, Welles told him to talk to Long.) By the same token, Roosevelt acceded at Yalta to Stalin’s demand for Soviet hegemony in Poland because of the disposition of allied troops in Europe and the desire to get the ...”

“... body represented in that pseudo-image of Fergie – what does it mean? Why does the woman’s body rouse so much hostility? Of course, the woman’s body doesn’t ‘do’ anything of the sort. Why do men feel such unreasonable rage against women? Why do they knock them about, legislate against them, imprison them in purdah, caricature them, stick them in ...”

“... of sociology, and drama favours a stage without too much human clutter. Veronica, the narrator of Anne Enright’s The Gathering, somewhere in the middle of a tribe of 12 (seventh from the top, fifth from the bottom), suggests there’s a certain uniformity about the large family: ‘There is always a drunk. There is always someone who has been interfered ...”