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“... for Godot, say, tempts the unwary to ‘interpret’ in Sontag’s negative sense, but they do so only to undo them. Their power to produce political effects by literary means is, in part, dependent on this double gesture. They disturb engrained habits of reading by staging the allegorising process, whether through the liberal Medical Officer’s ...”

“... too, mimicking the unfinished, unfinishable histories in which people live. But the characters do come to resolutions of a kind, getting up from whatever severe battering they have received to start life again, sadder and only a little the wiser. For Enid, there is the prospect of musical success; for her Uncle Felix, after he takes a beating in the back ...”

“... its dream of pure consumerism, pure wealth, pure leisure and, of course, the life eternal. To do all this you need an extraordinary plot, and a canvas so big that the minute gradations of psychological realism are lost in its sweep, an animated cartoon rather than close-up naturalism. And on all the usual plot-and-character counts, The Propheteers is well ...”

“... English Literature, and the names most ubiquitous in The Book History Reader, Roger Chartier and D.F. McKenzie, can be found on none of the new Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism’s several thousand pages. Perhaps this is as it should be; to call book history a theory would be to read it against the grain. For many literary critics a decade ago, the ...”

“... a person for, or what we think of when we hear their name. Think of Larkin, for example, and what do your see? A head like a pale, bespectacled bean and then maybe an image or two from the better-known poems, the shabby lodger, say, of ‘Mr Bleaney’, or the stony couple of ‘An Arundel Tomb’. Such reflections, it might be objected, are very ...”

“... a book of unrevised lectures called Varieties of Parable and a Collected Poems. Even now, with Peter McDonald’s intelligently re-edited Collected, we do not have all the MacNeice we could ask for. As McDonald points out, a Complete Poems would be considerably larger than the ...”

“... Peter Lilley, an international fraud investigator and no relation of the Tory MP for Hitchin and Harpenden, has written a book called Dirty Dealing: The Untold Truth about Global Money Laundering (Kogan Page, £16.99). Before outlining how best to prevent the crime, he explains the various ways to go about committing it, such as opening an anonymous Austrian Sparbuch – savings book – of which there are estimated to be twenty-six million in existence (Austria, for the record, has a population of just over eight million ...”

“... and my father was getting all musical. ‘We’re here to show the world that we’re gonnae do or die,’ he sang unprophetically, ‘coz England cannae dae it coz they didnae qualify.’ My birthday was spoiled, and I decided always to hate football and to make my father pay. I had a hidden stash of books in a former breadbin upstairs – the revenge ...”

“... this fate would befall J.H. Prynne: take him or leave him, it didn’t seem possible that he’d ever be acceptable. His name had become, as The Oxford Companion to 20th-Century Poetry put it in 1994, ‘synonymous with all that is most rebarbative in the work of the contemporary English avant-garde’. Considering his obscurity (limited edition pamphlets ...”

“... his counterpart. ‘This is marvellous,’ the visitor says, ‘but how can you afford it?’ ‘Do you see that bridge over there?’ his host asks. ‘What bridge?’ the visitor asks. ‘Exactly,’ his host replies: ‘100 per cent.’ Living in Italy (No. 63), and coming from Ireland (a surprisingly healthy 14th place), I had my own stories. I even have ...”

“... about to call him), was allowed to stay on in Baghdad when the Iraqis decided they were going to do without the others. Even before that it had been granted special facilities. Like Nasser in 1956, Saddam was counting heavily on use of the psychological arm in making war against the West, and in return for staying in business, CNN has been suspected of being ...”

“... the people, places, books and songs that he has known.Songs matter more than you might think; so do some places, especially California, and so, by the end, do the mixed blessings of fame. The most important place, though, is the first: Mossbawn, County Derry, the farmland where Heaney – the son of a cattle dealer and a ...”

“... in the rain, dispensing bread to our children to feed the ducks, just like our parents used to do with us. And we watched the news and read the papers, which was the usual depressing experience. The two main stories in June were the handing over to relatives of the dead of the report by the Northern Ireland police’s Historical Enquiries Team into the ...”

“... struck him as ‘bizarre’, in that the interview took place on the day her husband, Peter Robinson, went to Downing Street to accept the role of First Minister of the Northern Ireland Assembly ‘and there really was a sense that Iris had stolen his thunder’. Black, who was hired as her political adviser, does not say when he decided to ...”

“... guise of equality’. Matters were not calmed by the decision of Adams’s successor, Mary Lou McDonald, to conclude her first speech as president to the party’s Ard Fheis with: ‘Up the republic! Up the rebels! Tiocfaidh ár lá!’ This, translated as ‘Our day will come,’ was the rallying cry of the IRA. Poetry helped, once or twice. When ...”