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“... hands across an ocean, to the bound hands of John Williams, a minister of religion in Deerfield, a small settlement in New England. Europe’s conflicts are echoed and mimicked in this precarious, snow-bound frontier territory. The winter of 1703 to 1704 had been a season of ugly rumour, of a defensive huddle in the stockade, of a phoney war. And in the ...”

“... the heroic couplet, the staples of English versification from the 16th to the 19th century, seem small-timers by comparison. Sestinas have come and gone. Ottava rima and rhyme royal had their day, but lost favour when readers ceased to want long poems which combined storytelling with epigrammatic cleverness. Even now, when set poetic forms are generally ...”

“... Stephen King has occasionally raised a rueful protest against being typed as a horror writer – even with the consolation of being the best-selling horror writer in the history of the world. But, as he disarmingly reminds us, there is worse literary company than Lovecraft, Leiber, Bloch, Matheson and Jackson. ‘I could, for example, be an “important” writer like Joseph Heller and publish a novel every seven years or so, or a “brilliant” writer like John Gardner and write obscure books for bright academics who eat macrobiotic foods and drive old Saabs with faded but still legible GENE McCARTHY FOR PRESIDENT stickers on the rear bumpers ...”

“... clerk, examining the author’s credit card in Seattle, asked him if he was related to the poet Stephen Spender. Assured of his customer’s identity, the clerk expressed his pleasure: ‘Gee, a near-celebrity.’ No doubt the status of full celebrity was reserved for movie stars and ball-players. At any rate there is little doubt that Spender is the most ...”

“... if the retail sector has been taken over by Lebanese, Mauritanians and, lately, Chinese, and few small and medium-size French companies remain (most went out of business after a looting spree in 2004), Ivory Coast still has the appearance of a ‘colonised economy’. This, for France, is the worst of both worlds: a bad neocolonial image but no real ...”

“... Their stories correspond, but not in time or place. Phillips’s travellers leave their small Caribbean island for Britain in the 1950s, when prospects were cheery. The white folks of the West had never had it so good: too good, or so their masters told them, to settle at menial labours. Since the publication of her first novel, Brown ...”

“... with the work of Kipling, or Katherine Mansfield. But a story like Nabil Gorgy’s ‘Cairo is a small city’, though still intimately concerned with justice and injustice, employs the magical, repetitive form of the folk-tale to bring Engineer Adil Salim to a sticky end: he perishes as the guilty victim of a ritualised murder, administered by a Bedouin ...”

“... debt’. But this comparison, justified though it may be, is bound to make the deliberately small-scale character of Cooper’s achievement all the more evident. Scenes from Metropolitan Life is largely about the withering of worldly ambitions, ranging from the prospect of heady promotions in the Civil Service to the more personal goal of a happy and ...”

“... past, however, the pace of Pinget translations seems to have been hotted up by an enterprising small press in New York, Red Dust, who have not only reinstated the missing Passacaglia out proceeded to fill most remaining gaps with their stylish and relatively cheap publications. That Voice (Pinget’s penultimate novel, dating from 1975) appears in the ...”

“... around Watsonville. What about Rothstein’s Fleeing a Dust Storm, in which a father and two small boys struggle heads lowered against the blast, the smaller child lagging behind, trying to rub the dust out of his eyes? Again, there is only one parent in the shot: the family is evidently disintegrating. So is the house behind them, a miserable hut of ...”

“... out: incentives by the Chinese government are almost unheard of at the individual level or for small enterprises; the state has not produced an official narrative about its citizens’ forays into Africa; air fares between China and Africa are not subsidised; mostly family-based chain migration prevails, with certain provinces – Guangdong (the former ...”

“... by John Beyrle, the US ambassador to Moscow, who wrote that ‘police and MVD collect money from small businesses while the FSB collects from big businesses.’ But even when they amiably divide up the turf, the members of various agencies are doing so for their own individual purposes, not as part of a common project. The leaked cables also include the ...”

“... release from prison). The rooms upstairs were brightly lit, but no one seemed to be around. In a small living room we found Winnie Mandela, curled up on a sofa with a young man, apparently in a drunken stupor. We tiptoed out again.Over the years, I met Winnie in professional settings, but also through Alain Guénon and Jean-Yves Ollivier, two ...”

“... at the age of five, when his father offered him as a hostage in a high-risk manoeuvre against King Stephen which won John Marshal control of Newbury Castle during the messy civil war between Stephen and Queen Matilda (Stephen was charmed out of murderous fury when the doughty little boy ...”

“... The Horizon survey, in fact, serves as a model for this new investigation. In 1946, George Orwell, Stephen Spender, Herbert Read and Julian Maclaren-Ross each testified that he could manage on £1000 a year net. V.S. Pritchett needed a bit more. Elizabeth Bowen raised a few eyebrows at the time by confessing that ‘I would like to have £3500 a year ...”