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“... pagan children and the sleeping Christian wife must always have been striking, although not in James Beck’s view. Ilaria, Beck concedes, ‘may look “Gothic” ’ – as if we were about to claim that she actually was Gothic. Indeed, her narrow, high-collared dress, belted below the breast, with long curving ...”

“... what Rosenfeld calls ‘an actual philosophy of common sense’. Thomas Reid and his follower James Beattie were devout Protestants, inspired by English dissenters as well as by their often rigid Presbyterian colleagues. They were horrified by the progress of philosophical scepticism, exemplified by David Hume, which they saw as corroding the foundations ...”

“... picked a pickled peck Of pepper when he took on British Rail. With every kind of triumph at his beck And call, perhaps he felt the need to fail. His chance of saving something from the wreck Equals his chance to find the Holy Grail. You never know, though. He and Sidney Weighell Might possibly cook up some sort of deighell. If Buckton’s ASLEF joined ...”

“... of feeling was the sympathy its audience could be guaranteed to feel for a fellow worker at the beck and call of desk-bound button-pushers. It’s not hard to imagine them urging Charlie on up the stairs, while understanding only too well why he might want to dawdle. Chaplin doesn’t feature in Rachel Plotnick’s engrossing cultural history of the advent ...”

“... to think of him as ‘The Laughing Policeman’, after the book in the Sjöwall/Wahlöö Martin Beck series, which I’ve lately been blazing through. Every week he brings in cops from different departments and agencies to show off their gear. I didn’t know what I was looking for exactly, so I paid close attention to everything and came home at night with ...”

“... with more fillers than prizes. The best things are from the youngest contributors, such as James Campbell and Alan Hollinghurst, and the less youthful A.E. Ellis. Each here performs the same narrative trick, telling some resonant or portentous tale through more or less awkward or impercipient or blindly obsessive observers. In Hollinghurst’s ‘A ...”

“... House’s ‘Special’ The Falkland Islands Dispute – International Dimensions Professor James Fawcett agrees on line 3 that ‘the determination of territorial title, when it is disputed, is a complex issue of fact and law,’ and asserts on line 31 that ‘the territorial title to the islands... must be accorded to the United Kingdom.’ On this ...”

“... and the great beauty of the ‘other book’ come partly from the dissonance of its elements. James Barrie noted in 1922 that ‘long after writing P. Pan its true meaning came back to me – desperate attempt to grow up but can’t.’ Le Grand Meaulnes is about adolescents who want to want not to grow up, but fail. Alain-Fournier, as has been pointed ...”

“... of the possible scope of NSA operations in December 2005 when the New York Times ran a story by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau on massive warrantless surveillance: ‘Bush Lets US Spy on Callers without Courts’. The government was demanding and getting from the telecoms all the records it wanted of calls both to and from their customers. But the feed had ...”

“... in today’s ‘risk society’. According to the risk society theory of Anthony Giddens, Ulrich Beck and others, we no longer live our lives in compliance with Nature or Tradition; there is no symbolic order or code of accepted fictions (what Lacan calls the ‘Big Other’) to guide us in our social behaviour. All our impulses, from sexual orientation to ...”

“... to Bainbridge. Then through Oughtershaw and along Langstrothdale by what is called Oughtershaw Beck but is in fact the Wharfe, both the Wharfe and the Ribble rising in these hills, one flowing south, the other west. The stone circle is small and hard to find and the search is made harder because all down the beck cars ...”

“... Rossetti met her first love. She was not yet 18 when Gabriel’s friend and fellow art student James Collinson took an interest in her. A quiet, meek little chap from a philistine Midlands family, he was to join the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood for a while, hover between Anglicanism and Catholicism, and paint rather good genre pictures, the chief of ...”

“... On​ 2 November 1921, James Joyce wrote from Paris to his aunt Josephine in Dublin asking if it was ‘possible for an ordinary person to climb over the area railings of No. 7 Eccles Street, either from the path or the steps, lower himself from the lowest part of the railings till his feet are within 2 feet or 3 off the ground and drop unhurt ...”

“... original, slightly self-conscious metaphor and mild archaism of diction. Yet the second poem, ‘Beck’, far more imaginative and dense, leads us a stage further into the terrain with which the book identifies and also sets up the boldest dialectic with ‘Scafell Pike’: every mountain and hill is being slowly and eternally worn flat. Nicholson’s ...”

“... I walk down to get the papers this morning, but when I draw nearer it takes off and flaps up the beck. Not a rare bird, the heron’s size is never less than spectacular, and grey and white though they are they still seem exotic. Bitterly cold with snow forecast later so we get off early up the M6 to Penrith and Brampton, hoping to have a look at the Written ...”