“... thought. There are some fascinating hints of this, in references to his admiration for Sir Robert Peel, his fondness for cautious, piecemeal change, his lack of reverence for history (combined with an element of pious nostalgia for his father’s heyday in the late 19th century). Above all, there is his utter remoteness from the socio-sacramental ...”

“... of these possibilities are fascinating, whatever our scepticism may be about the larger project. Robert Nozick is cited (twice) as producing the elegant suggestion that we don’t have to choose between presence and absence, or between Heidegger’s Seiendes and Nichts, since we could have both, eventually (perhaps ‘the universe is not yet spiritually ...”

“... I had lunch with a writer friend of my foster mother, along with five or six visiting Russians and Robert Graves. Graves of the halo of curly white hair, not at all good looking, fat and pasty, in his late sixties or early seventies. I sat at the table opposite him in awed silence, gazing, longing for him to speak to me, not daring to say anything for fear ...”

“... Thus were the British defeated. However, while the tiger is undoubtedly emblematic of Tipu, the self-styled Tiger of Mysore, and his fierce resistance to European colonialism, there is no evidence he had a particular European in mind. He may well have heard about the death of Munro – two of his sons were being held hostage by the British in Calcutta at ...”

“... was not accepted at once. Dyson was now joining the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and Robert Oppenheimer, its director, at first refused to believe in the new theories, or in Dyson’s exposition. Oppenheimer usually had a very quick and deep perception, but when he did not accept an argument he could be very cutting in his comment and make it ...”

“... The Strange Museum marks, as they say, an interesting development. The poems here are less self-contained, more resonant and suggestive, than those earlier ones. Paulin, moreover, now speaks with a distinct personal voice and, like Muldoon, though more sombrely, can lead the mind into strange corners, many of them unswept for years – as in the title ...”

“... that Dan Carden, once a Corbynite Green New Dealer, now convenes the Blue Labour Group and writes self-flagellating articles calling for a wave of reindustrialisation through rearmament. The remainder of the party’s left that has not been expelled or gagged implores its leaders to take on vested interests and raise taxes on the rich. All agree on the need ...”

“... sets out six specimens equidistant in a row. Each is a fragment, but each has the quality of self-possession characteristic of McEwen. From left to right they are a broken bud, a small leaf lightly withered, a larger leaf also withered, a piece of bark, three seed pods, a torn branch and a sycamore seed with one wing missing. Writing about another series ...”

“... Blyth’s banalities, are at odds with this discordant factor, and only Sir Frederick Ashton and Robert Tear express an independent disenchantment, the former in something close to bitchiness, the latter in a more technical way: Tear was banished after choosing to sing Dov in The Knot Garden rather than Lechmere in Owen Wingrave, and there can surely be no ...”

“... that the Aussies bring it on themselves, with their Barry McKenzies, their Ian Chappells, their self-parodying Foster ads, and so on. And there is the accent: for some reason more readily mimickable than any of our own regional twangs. Theories about the Australian accent are just as snooty as theories about Australia. Some say that it is a form of ...”

“... that Wilson somewhat neglected his journal. There is now only a little of the characteristic self-absorption of the true journal-keeper, to whom nothing human is alien as long as he has a part in it – and to whom his own absurdities are as worthy of record as anything else: – Blond woman violinist with Portia-like yellow hair – Ruth Posselt ...”

“... caps picked up on the Lodi battlefield, and held to the uppers by bits of string. Lieutenant Robert, the young conscript who is for the moment the author’s other self, and who will make a cursory appearance later in the novel as an Italian Count, is formally invited to dinner by the Marchese on whom he is ...”

“... was noisy, lively, inventive – a ‘political carnival’, as Lynn Bennie, James Mitchell and Robert Johns describe it in their new book, Surges in Party Membership: The SNP and Scottish Greens after the Independence Referendum (Routledge, £135). Its ‘innovative campaigning methods’ included ‘campaign stalls, impromptu flash mobs, city marches and ...”

“... both of whom died before she was nineteen. She had one child, John, with her first partner; two, Robert and Shannon, with her second; and two more, Chloe and William, with her third. By the time William was born, Christine had endured beatings, depression and at least one suicide attempt. She drank heavily and abused amphetamines.William was placed on the ...”

“... wasn’t just American, but freakishly American, and like any good scout was both pathologically self-assured and incurably naive. David Foster Wallace said that he spoke like ‘Jimmy Stewart on acid’ (though Lynch’s addictions were the diner-appropriate kind: coffee, sugar, cigarettes). Whatever the contradiction – mainstream ...”