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“... used for desirable ends is certainly an extraordinarily unlikely eventuality and perhaps even a self-contradictory idea. Good nuclear weapons have to be weapons which are feared so deeply and so steadily that there is never a real danger of their being used. But weapons of which there is literally no danger of their being used cannot rationally be feared at ...”

“... you used to cook food or treat frost-bite. The tablets themselves represent another tribute to self-sufficiency. Writing on wood was common enough in the Greco-Roman world. Normally, to judge from the survivals and from the comments of their literary users, the flat surface of the tablet held a shallow central depression, which was filled with wax. Such ...”

“... funeral took place before the report came in, and, as the ceremony was ending, a man called Robert Burns – Shirley Ann’s uncle – took out a Beretta and shot the reverend three times in the head. There was no insurance, but Radney was quick to see fresh opportunities. Burns had done what half the town dreamed of doing, and few people wanted to see ...”

“... needless to say, no respectable woman was allowed backstage, where only the entitled male – a self-declared ‘connoisseur’ of women, whether as lecher, or in rare cases, as painter – might tread. These baroque rules explain some painted facts: Degas had the freedom to place his focus anywhere in the theatre, the viewer’s nose and eye one moment ...”

“... disappeared as it has been surrounded and overlaid by successive Chinese visions of the modern. Robert Barnett’s experience of Lhasa does not go back as far as the Dalai Lama’s memory: he first visited in 1987, as a tourist on a not very profound search for enlightenment. He never got to the cave where he had planned a week of meditation. Instead, on ...”

“... depiction of Cameron in The Death of the Heart (1938), make of the characterisation of himself as Robert, the crypto-Nazi spy whose loyalty his lover Stella is gradually forced to question as the story unfolds until, at the end, unmasked, he falls or jumps to his death from the roof of her house? Much of what Bowen put into her letters of what she wanted to ...”

“... In May 1804, at the age of 18, Benjamin Robert Haydon left his home in Plymouth and set off for London to become a great artist. His mother was distraught, his father furious, but there was no doubt in Haydon’s mind either of his vocation or of his genius. He could have worked in his father’s bookshop and inherited a secure, independent income but he didn’t want to ...”

“... with a powerful sense of historical destiny. John Lydgate’s Troy Book provided the defining self-image for Henry’s regime: the British, like the Romans, were refugees from the ruins of Troy and now, like the Romans, they would conquer an empire. This confident sense of imperial mission faded as victory turned to stalemate, but the classical idiom that ...”

“... are plain-living, selfless and even saintly, while others are envious, untrustworthy and self-seeking. Some anti-egalitarians are greedy, complacent and callous, while others are open-handed, fair-minded and genuinely committed to the well-being of their dependants and subordinates. But that commonplace observation is no help in the quest for a ...”

“... and Hazlitt all this has gone out the window. At their hands the essay becomes an autonomous, a self-justifying genre; it is now literature. That is, it serves no ulterior purposes, performs no public function. Self-justifying means self-regarding. And where Charles Lamb is ...”

“... drinking, working, playing and the sheer ebullience of success, London remained all his life the self-made undergraduate, working his way through the college of manly experience and always ready for further deeds of initiation. His personality is far more sympathetic than Hemingway’s, though he has none of Hemingway’s unerring originality as a ...”

“... Washington the day before Martin Luther King was shot, and arrived in Los Angeles a week after Robert Kennedy’s assassination.’ In spite of these omissions, Sara Maitland has found in her own fiction ‘a pride in the Sixties’, a regret for ‘a period that was culturally significant, an explosion of energy’, which she contrasts with the shameful ...”

“... plotting: since the crime has already been committed (the abduction of Owen Kane, the killing of Robert, the RUC officer), the narratives are internalised – rueful accounts of the lives of good but guilty men. The action is economical, the characters entirely engaging: both novels were made into successful films, full of psychological insights, unravelling ...”

“... reasons’, to create an entire book in a largely seamless approximation of Moat’s tone: self-pitying, self-justifying, sentimental, with strong undercurrents of violence – like one long Geordie country and western song. ‘The aim,’ Hankinson writes in his author’s note, ‘was to stay within Raoul Moat’s ...”

“... there would have been too upsetting.’In The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph (1989), Robert Wistrich argues that for Roth ‘the world of the shtetl re-emerged as the ideal embodiment of a lost intimacy and innocence; the materialist values of the Western Bürgertum (Jewish and Gentile) represented its ...”