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“... Polis Centre spent ten years (from 1993 to 2003) charting and analysing 1035 city-states. John Ma’s book, in some respects a monumental update of A.M.H. Jones’s The Greek City (1940), draws on the Copenhagen research as well as decades of work by French epigraphists such as Philippe Gauthier and Louis Robert on the vast number of inscriptions ...”

“... against the smoothness of his grain are a product of their own time. The 18th-century historian John Gillies admired the Anabasis’ combination of ‘such descriptive beauty, with such profound knowledge of war and of human nature, and … such inimitable eloquence, as never were reunited in the work of any one man’, but we are more inclined to prise ...”

“... signals the critical thrust of Murray’s book. He opposes the ‘new orthodoxy’ expounded by John Carey in his 1992 polemic, The Intellectuals and the Masses. This biography aims to vindicate Huxley as a humane thinker and artist rather than the crypto-fascist, eugenicist, public-school snob, or (in later life) the ‘fully fledged, fuzzy-brained ...”

“... Quest’è ’l verno, ma tal che gioia apporte Antonio Vivaldi If you think she exists like that, you should think again. It’s winter now, and love is not the question. Children see wolves through the trees and the beauty astounds them. Winter, they say; it’s winter, and joy is the question. Mistake her for what you will: when she stands in your path at evening, she is not the enemy you always hoped to find ...”

“... this mood, which contrasted strongly with the social documentaries produced in the 1930s by John Grierson, who subordinated questions of aesthetics to the dispassionate recording of reality. Marker disavowed cinéma vérité, describing his own documentary style as ‘ciné, ma vérité’; he makes no attempt to ...”

“... thinking of – and because the vast autobiography that she wrote in middle age, L’Histoire de ma vie, and her even vaster correspondence, which runs to 25 volumes in the modern edition, form an uncommonly rich and attractive documentary whole, the record of a muddled life lived with an estimable generosity and resilience that you don’t have to read ...”

“... account of his crime written by a 19th-century French murderer: Moi Pierre Rivière ayant égorgé ma mère, ma soeur et monfrère ..., a statement precious, in Foucauldian terms, as a rare public instance of the normally suppressed discourse of madness. Now, from the man who coached Foucault in philosophy, we have another ...”

“... of winter’; I could have lived happily in a world of perpetual cold. So when I began reading John Evelyn’s diary entries for January and February 1684, I should have been delighted. Instead, I felt an odd revulsion: 9 January: I went across the Thames on the ice, now become so thick as to bear not only streets of booths, in which they roasted ...”

“... In the beginning there was Cookham, and Pa and Ma and ten other children apart from Stanley, including two who died in childhood. Cookham was Paradise, but Paradise ended with the 1914 War. Afterwards there were years of confusion, then the discovery of sex. And all the while there was religion, and paintings that tried to express religious feeling, latterly including always in various forms the artist and one or other of his two wives ...”

“... best-kept secret in America,’ Hurston said as late as 1950. Wilson’s first commercial play, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, staged in 1984, may have been experienced by Black audiences as testimony; to white audiences it was still news.In their theatrical dramatisation down the decades from property to personhood, Wilson’s unmoored characters form a kind ...”

“... trailing behind a great-aunt who was showing my grandmother the sights; each called the other ‘Ma’. My great-aunt, too, was particularly attached to one sentence: every thirty yards or so she would stop and say: ‘And this is the ‘igh Street, Ma.’ When my grandmother finally broke her silence, she spoke for us ...”

“... to the living Tennyson and taught all levels from matriculation classes through BA honours to MA and PhD level. Examining was done externally by London University and during the eight years Arber had had charge at Birmingham there was not one failure in English. The account of Arber’s ‘Literary Work’ – his publications – runs to 40 printed ...”

“... grim as Coetzee’s South Africa ever was; the cold, dysfunctional, misogynist central character, John, is as compromised and unappealing as the disgraced David Lurie. But perhaps Youth is being taken too seriously, and we are meant to mock this grim young man and the Conradian title that portentously frames his rite of passage. A good deal depends on whether ...”

“... formulae. Belbo’s last words to the Diabolicals are uttered in Piedmontese dialect, Ma gavte la nata, a phrase he has uttered before and which means roughly, ‘let the cork out’ – a reference to persons so inflated with their own portentousness that they should be decorked from behind, like champagne bottles. Eco’s chapters have ...”

“... but in dialogue she’s addressed as ‘middle sister’ (by her sisters), as ‘daughter’ (by ma), as ‘sister-in-law’ (by third brother-in-law) and as ‘maybe-girlfriend’ (by her ‘almost one year so far maybe-boyfriend’). The milkman’s first words to her are: ‘You’re one of the who’s-it girls, aren’t you? So-and-so was your ...”