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“... of Castro speaking to a mass audience: ‘the dialogue of two tuning-forks whose vibrations summon forth vibrations in each other. Fidel and the mass begin to vibrate in a dialogue of growing intensity, which reaches its culminating point in the abrupt ending crowned by our victorious battle-cry, Patria o muerte.’ Bourne is too often content with that level ...”

“... of elegies for the dead interspersed with similes, and pares away almost all narrative elements. Christopher Logue’s dazzling paraphrases adopt a fragmentary form which appears to have been broken apart by the violence it represents, which is often grotesque (‘His neck was cut clean through/Except for a skein of flesh off which/His head hung down like a ...”

“... chipped, Bronze angel-heads once knobs attached to chests, (Handled when ancient dames chose forth brocade) Modern chalk drawings, studies from the nude, Samples of stone, jet, breccia, porphyry Polished and rough, sundry amazing busts In baked earth, (broken, Providence be praised!) A wreck of tapestry, proudly-purposed web When reds and blues were ...”

“... hills. This is where you find Tibbie Shiel’s Inn, where the Blackwood’s boys James Hogg and Christopher North used to come to liquefy their rhetoric. We entered from a smirr of rain, snoking for supper. It turned out supper was something that happened in the glen before 6.30 p.m. A lady in a white lab coat emerged to remind us of the fact. The phrase ...”

“... in its uncompromising vision, dedication, integrity, unswerving response to experience, and so forth. An interview with John Fuller in the recent number of Poetry Review, like other things in that worthy periodical, has the rather lowering effect, for an outsider, of poets talking about their practices and their poet friends in a charmed circle. This even ...”

“... that so soon as the whole nation lifted up its voice for parliamentary reform, spies were sent forth. These were selected from the most worthless and infamous of mankind and dispersed among the multitude of famished and illiterate labourers. It was their business if they found no discontent to create it.Only a few days after the five Cato Street plotters ...”

“... and not the real deal. Culture of Complaint may prove to be the most influential such screed since Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism. Hughes is much funnier than Lasch, and probably happier – his strings of metaphor are evidence that the author enjoys his work. Nimble yet lunkish, his sense of humour favours sarcasm and the well-turned ...”

“... and I believe it to be, in the end, false. The response of the young was less critical. Christopher lsherwood went as an undergraduate to Richards’s lectures and hailed him as ‘the prophet we have been waiting for ... To us, he was infinitely more than a brilliantly new literary critic; he was our guide, our evangelist, who revealed to us, in a ...”

“... a touch of mystery.’ As Czesław Miłosz, whom he greatly admired, said, ‘a thing is brought forth which we didn’t know we had in us.’ The originatory darkness is often figured in Heaney as feminine, mysterious and divinatory, ‘the unburdening of the indefinable through pangs that are indescribable’, and the architectonic business of bringing ...”

“... saw him fling the stone, as if he meant/At once his murder and his monument.’ This trick calls forth no shudder, it is only a trick. However, there are also conceits that possess a high degree of beauty and seriousness. The other day I came almost by accident on a conceit of the imaginative kind that has the same machinery as the funny ones but is ...”

“... led him in the eyes of many to betray his left-wing views altogether. Such, no doubt, is how Christopher Hitchens will be remembered. The resemblances to George Orwell, on whom Hitchens has written so admiringly,* are obvious enough, though so are some key differences. Orwell was a kind of literary proletarian who lived in dire straits for most of his ...”

“... acknowledge this. ‘The end of empire is not a pretty thing if examined too closely,’ as Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper put it in their two-volume history of Britain’s colonial wars in India and South-East Asia from the 1940s to 1963, which forms the perfect complement to Hyam’s work.* It was clearly not as pretty as that ‘great ship goes ...”

“... were photos depicting older men having power over younger ones and beating them with chains and so forth, or whether he meant something even more sinister and real’. Not much amazement left there.Purdy’s imagination drifts rather flatly towards the atrocious, and hideous events unfold in an atmosphere of lurid calm. Roy rapes Gareth on Brian’s ...”

“... pie-eyed and with some concern, my brother made his exit. On the drive home, my father gave forth with some extreme editorialising about my brother’s predisposition to trouble. But the old man got a thrill out of it. He and my brother had their problems, not least because they resembled each other in their belligerent behaviour, but they loved each ...”

“... the quotidian duties entailed by being a great power: embassies are run, cables go back and forth, visits, bilateral treaties, aid agreements are negotiated, and pronouncements are made. But the heavy boxing that characterised Reagan’s Middle Eastern policy from its beginning until roughly the midde of 1984 – a period that included the return of the ...”