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“... Nussbaum that democracy requires a strong national identity on the part of its citizens, and Michael Walzer insists that his circle of allegiances (‘spheres of affection’) starts, not with the outermost periphery, but at the ‘centre’. In a book with the same title, For Love of Country, Maurizio Viroli offers further, more sustained reflections on ...”

“... and prayers don’t help a bit Nor raise the temperature by one degree. The fire is just to burn those who don’t drown As too full of young voices she goes down. This is the finest hour of Mail and Star. The Sun especially is cock-a-hoop, Shouting commands as if at Trafalgar. Swab out the trunnion cleats and calk that poop! What terrifying warriors ...”

“... of In the Heart of the Country (1977), Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) and Life and Times of Michael K (1983), to the confessional monologue of Age of Iron (1990) and the literary-historical pastiches of Foe (1986) and The Master of Petersburg (1994), Coetzee’s approach has been varied, his idiom pliable. He has written in the voice of a repressed ...”

“... for cinematography – and the scene is much the most powerful in the film. It almost makes Michael Nyman’s hyperbolic score (the music in Planet of the Apes is subtle by comparison) tolerable. In all such scenes of epiphany (Charlton Heston breaking down at the sight of the half-buried Statue of Liberty at the end of Planet of the Apes is ...”

“... Michi was nobody is certain: a forgotten manager, an outsider, one of the chori or colonos called Michael? The other surviving settlements in the Perené Colony, Pampa Silva and Pampa Whaley, are also named after dead functionaries. In the version we hear from some of those who laboured on the plantation, all three bosses were killed by indigenous people. But ...”

“... the role of Bryan and the director kept saying: ‘More pompous, Morone. Make him more pompous.’ Michael Kazin is a fine historian who specialises in the lost causes of the left. He has written sympathetic books on the Populist movement and the 1960s. In A Godly Hero, his life of Bryan, he now draws an unexpected conclusion: defying capitalists and defending ...”

“... to do to that house what Thady’s descendants had done to the mansions of my Anglo-Irish kin, to burn the bloody place to the ...”

“... produced hardly any result – not a single man at Stamford Bridge in November 1914 when Colonel Burn MP perhaps misjudged the inspirational effect of his reference to the death of his recently enlisted son. The ‘soccerites’ so often despised by rugby men did not always see the point of offering to be killed or maimed. The volunteering of the ...”

“... Rosa would, I suppose, have been unveiled. Unless the carbolic acid caused a third-degree burn, the scalpel slipped, the paraffin migrated or she developed paraffinoma or ‘wax cancer’. In which case, there would, presumably, have been no ‘after’ picture. Worryingly, in her history of cosmetic surgery, Elizabeth Haiken ends the paragraph on ...”

“... soldiers back from Vietnam and to Russian troops back from Chechnya. In the homelands the lights burn bright, the shops are full and everyone is dancing, while their brave boys shed blood in some hell-hole. It was not like that to return from Dunkirk to London, or from Stalingrad to Berlin, or even from Guam to Los Angeles, during the war. Everyone’s life ...”

“... real books to his name and selections of work in the two most influential anthologies of the time, Michael Roberts’s Faber Book of Modern Verse and Yeats’s Oxford Book of Modern Verse. Eliot was a sincere admirer and generous patron; Yeats was delighted with Barker’s ‘lovely subtle mind and a rhythmic invention comparable to Gerard Hopkins’. What ...”

“... bugs, there’s a reason for it. What he wants to taste is the otherness of insects, their fast-burn and utterly alien sense of time. The quotation from Enrique Anderson Imbert at the start of Eye of the Cricket clarifies the quest: ‘Then I felt within me the desperate rebelliousness of things that did not want to die, the thirst of mosses, the anxiety in ...”

“... boys with what I still think of as normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the bestseller lists in the space ...”

“... superstate, and ‘the people’ is plastered across almost every Euro-story. In February, Michael Portillo was praised for reminding Chancellor Kohl that the nation state was far from a thing of the past: ‘OUR nation is very important to the people of the United Kingdom. We’ve given away enough to Europe already.’ Kohl is ‘just interested in ...”

“... to begin to mention – that writing plays is a young person’s game, and that most playwrights burn out after ten years and fall prey either to drink or to more agreeable and profitable occupations. There are a couple of examples of this tendency from the Restoration period (Etherege abandoned writing plays for diplomacy, and Wycherley for despair). But ...”