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“... begins momentously with Joseph Conrad, and develops into a meticulous and heartfelt tribute to Stephen Crane, concludes by recommending an old leather portmanteau as the best possible manure for fig trees. Mrs Gwendolen Bishop no doubt astonished Holland Park Avenue with the splendour of her costume; it’s the onions we remember her by. Recollection was a ...”

“... and each had demographic consequences that reach into the present. The historians R.W. Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft have put ‘excess deaths’ from the First World War, Revolution and Civil War – including those caused by disease and mass hunger – at 14.5 million. The effects on the Soviet population of political repression and the famine of 1932-33 ...”

“... a man. In a woman all this internal urging is a mistake; it leads to nothing, and breaks loose in sharp utterances and passionate overthrows of conventionality.’ Her own achievements, first as a waspish socialite and later as an unsuitable political wife, seemed to confirm this as a bitter truth; but Virginia’s, now set out cleanly before her, showed that ...”

“... justice, will be at an end. This is the sort of cynical paradox that appeals to Bew, providing a sharp reflection of the contemporary political mind. But it leaves unanswered the question of where the elaborate collusions, acceptances and hypocrisies of the pre-Reform age would have led. As it was, the 1830s would see O’Connell in alliance with the ...”

“... really meant. Moore is famous for the super-real vivacity of her ‘zingers’, brief, sharp, stand-up comedy encapsulations of what her characters, her story, the world as she sees it, are about. ‘Everyone tried hard to be funny,’ the heroine of ‘Agnes of Iowa’ tells her husband, trying to explain why, after seven years away from it, she ...”

“... probability, is true.The unhappy pattern anyway is starting to be noticed. The Times published a sharp letter to the editor a few days later that noticed how the paper had now crossed the line separating news analysis from invective. This has happened across the board, in the culture of the Trump presidency: you see it in the newspapers, the magazines and in ...”

“... to ‘cronyism’ and ‘orange’ (a reference to the sexual practices of the late Stephen Milligan).Tories, however, have tended to have the last laugh, because, as Edmund Fawcett suggests early in his book, the left has been a ‘rash chess player’, too cocky and blinkered to strategise effectively against its opponents. Fawcett, a veteran ...”

“... like most of Dahl’s stories it has the emotional boniness of a shaggy dog story: it rests on a sharp punchline, but there is no love for or between the people in it. The tales from this period generally conclude with a snappy but mechanical twist in which the cheat is cheated, or the person trying to defraud someone else by betting or gambling or ...”

“... for us now are some very familiar names – Jonathan Culler, Christopher Norris, Annette Lavers, Stephen Heath etc – and under his guidance, we gather, they all got on extremely well, ‘preserving a tone of good humour in the midst of the most serious, even the most fierce, exchanges’. Kermode remained, as he declared in Continuities, ‘more in favour ...”

“... arresting picture of a writer in Peterley Harvest is that of A.E. Housman delivering his Leslie Stephen Lecture, ‘The Name and Nature of Poetry’. Every fact that Pennington uses, from the date and the time to the presence of Quiller-Couch and Will Spens, the Vice-Chancellor, may once more be checked from works subsequently published, such as The Letters ...”

“... of 72 who says he’s bored with taking snapshots in the studio (this morning Isaiah Berlin and Stephen Spender) and wants to photograph me outside. ‘Outside’ means that eventually I find myself perched up a tree in Hyde Park. Avedon’s assistants bustle round with lights, Avedon himself scarcely bothering to look through the lens, just enquiring from ...”

“... not only stereotyped and tiresome but dated in a way that Leopold Bloom’s responses to women, or Stephen Dedalus’s don’t seem dated. There is no element of richness or surprise, and there is a terrible ironic distance and jauntiness (more noticeable in The Luck of Ginger Coffey and The Emperor of Ice-Cream). Clearly, the passage quoted above could not be ...”

“... to the principle of national self-determination. And it is hardly the only state that has faced sharp criticism on these grounds. In the autumn of 2001, and especially in the spring of 2002, the Bush administration tried to reduce anti-American sentiment in the Arab world and undermine support for terrorist groups like al-Qaida by halting Israel’s ...”

“... the false dichotomy between Nixon the foreign-policy maestro and Nixon the employer of regrettable sharp practices on the domestic front. What we call ‘Watergate’ was the belated and in some ways accidental revenge for a whole series of foreign policy crimes and blunders. The Committee to Re-Elect the President, or CREEP, was the repository of an entire ...”

“... Zero in 1972). Ten of the pieces these two books collect have already appeared in English in Stephen Heath’s valuable selection Image-Music-Text, and three are also to be found in Sontag’s anthology. An editor’s note to The Responsibility of Forms manages to miscount these previously translated items, and to turn Heath’s text into a test. It also ...”