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“... one of the squirts of desperate rage from one of the souls in hell, makes everything else seem small and distant. It’s extremely hard, though, to describe the exact mixture of qualities that makes it wonderful. In the first half of the 20th century the Commedia was often regarded as a classic with a philosophical core ...”

“... and Russia. The Japanese, during their occupation of Korea (1910-45), transformed Chongjin from a small fishing village into an important port, with massive steelworks and chemical factories. It has been closed to foreigners since the Korean War and was also, as Demick notes, one of the places hardest hit by the devastating famine of the mid-1990s. Demick got ...”

“... child lives in a tumult of casual information about the wide world. Lore and gossip pouring into a small child are its entry to human life. Its awareness of love and envy, greed and caring is not limited to its immediate personal interactions with family and neighbours, but is informed by the delightful or spiteful tales they tell about everybody else. All the ...”

“... Brigid Lyons Thornton, suggested that he stay in the Greville Arms Hotel in Granard, a small town 16 miles from Longford town. ‘Auntie Thornton’, as we called her, was also involved in the Republican movement: on this occasion, however, it wasn’t subversion but match-making that was on her mind. Collins might have been a revolutionary leader ...”

“... a sequel is a highly conservative genre that supplies the comfort of familiarity together with the small frisson of difference. Publishers, film studios and TV executives love sequels, since they seem to guarantee a ready-made audience. A glance at the New York Times bestseller list at the time of writing shows one sequel at the top of the list (the further ...”

“... and round in the same barrel, is sharks with shirt-jacs, sharks with well-pressed fins, ripping we small fry off with razor grins; nothing ain’t change but color and attire ... Walcott evidently means to identify himself with Spoiler. Classically educated and widely travelled, he can’t share in the brave new optimism of Independence and Black Power. He ...”

“... bedstead and side tables. They are wood, and they annoy me a little. Opposite my bed, in the very small room, a wall of mirrored cupboards reflects the whiteness back at itself, making it twice the size it thought it was. In the morning, if I arrange myself carefully when I wake, I can open my eyes to nothing but whiteness.If I trace it back, that wish for ...”

“... an American woman who kept parrots and there were perches in the downstairs room and also in its small garden. Slightly older than the other houses in the crescent, like many of them it had been a lodging house, so every room had its own gas meter and some had washbasins. I did most of the decorating myself, picking out the blurred and whitewashed frieze in ...”

“... to suck out the spirit until it looks the way you think it should. We are all historians in our small way. And in some ghastly way Pol Pot was more honest than the rest of us have been. Pol Pot decided to dispense with the past altogether. To dispense with the sham of treating the past with objective respect. In Cambodia the cities were to be wiped ...”

“... to the magnitude of the earth’. In her more recent Faber Book of Contemporary American Poetry, Helen Vendler has made a comparable point, arguing that geographically and topographically there must be many American poetries: ‘There will be no American landscape that does not speak in words as well as in line and colour.’ I am hoping to suggest that ...”

“... where the people are corrupt, democracy is immoral (though it is easy enough to imagine, say, a small community in which a clear majority vote to torment a racial minority). Professor Barton sticks up for the plebeians. She argues strenuously that, even if they did hang back and refuse ‘to thread the gates’ as Coriolanus says, they did show courage in ...”

“... muscles, all the mucous membranes have to play their role in this magnificent symphony.’ Most small children adore the obvious pleasure of pleasure; what the adults politely call ‘affection’ is often irresistible to the child’s profoundly sensual self. It is this, along with their intense, sometimes daunting suffering, that adults find most ...”

“... offers no explanation, but by including this strange remark invites our curiosity. Steventon was a small community that had known Jane all her life, and James too – along with his second wife Mary Lloyd, whom Jane Austen disliked for her unkindness to her stepdaughter Anna and her meanness over money. A common reason why an author’s friend or relative ...”

“... Last December​ , in Russia for the first time, I saw a small panel painting in the Hermitage showing The Vision of St Augustine: the saint, in full episcopal fig, is sitting on a riverbank near a child who is scooping up water with a spoon and pouring it into a hole in the sand. According to the story, which is usually set on a beach, the saint is asking the little boy what he thinks he’s up to; to which the child replies that he’s trying to empty the sea into the hole ...”

“... following in the region, of a mad and dangerous kind, which requires the crucifixion mainly of small animals, but later of babies and grown-ups too. Llosa’s technique is at full experimental stretch in weaving a convincing tangle out of the luridly coloured threads in this story of two sorts of deep human requirement getting out of hand. He strings ...”