“... my own self within me in clearer colours than I possessed at first. I have not made my book any more than it has made me – a book of one substance with its author, proper to me and a limb of my life.’ This is a pose. It is also serious. For Montaigne, introspection provides a theme, a method, an approach to life. It befits his status as an amateur man ...”

“... with the clouds scudding over the top. We passed into Scotland and saw a sign for Ecclefechan, ‘Thomas Carlyle’s birthplace’ as one of those brown signs reminded us. Karl thought the town might offer the chance of a sandwich. We slipped off the motorway and inched through the ordered trees to the town, which seemed like it had been put to sleep some ...”

“... modern anthropology. McLennan and Tylor, Malinowski and Pitt-Rivers come to mind. No one has done more to examine their leading concepts (‘culture’, ‘evolution’) or place them in perspective than George Stocking of the University of Chicago. His brilliant essays and intellectual leadership have virtually built an academic specialty. And Victorian ...”

“... two collections of short stories, he has been compared to Proust, Wordsworth and Milton.’ After more than twenty-five years’ labour, he has finally published ‘the most eagerly awaited first novel of all time’. Sadly, The Runaway Soul is only the most overweight first novel of all time. A sort of Midwestern version of Whitman’s ‘Song of ...”

“... regrettable, but beyond that, seven of the ten poets are published by Faber, the outsiders being Thomas Kinsella, the unignorable Geoffrey Hill and the successful Craig Raine: in the world of literary publishing, such matters have some importance. Two of the pieces were published in Quarto, until recently edited by Raine himself. Raine’s name crops up in ...”

“... and public failure, and to my mind the consolations they afford are unconvincing – no more than a redemptive prettiness. A large part of the plot of Oh what a paradise it seems is about Sears’s attempt to preserve a fine stretch of natural water from the pollutions of a corrupt local authority, and this concern for nature reveals the strengths ...”

“... was born in 1917, awarded the Nobel Prize in 1972 (the first German writer thus honoured since Thomas Mann in 1929 – Hermann Hesse having adopted Swiss citizenship, and Nelly Sachs Swedish) and died in 1985. He was an early instance, an avatar, of the writer as right thinker, as influencer, like Rushdie, like Solzhenitsyn, like Pasolini: his was the ...”

“... of philosophical rigour. Many authorities, especially outside the English-speaking world, took a more flexible view of the range of forces that might be involved in Earth history; but there is no doubt that Lyell’s denial of catastrophes was influential. By the middle of the 20th century, most experts viewed meteorite impacts and global extinctions as the ...”

“... who drive foreign cars, mock patriotism and advocate abortion and homosexuality on the other: so Thomas Frank argues in What’s the Matter with America? The main economic interest of populist conservatism is to get rid of the strong state, which taxes the population in order to finance regulatory interventions, and to introduce an economic programme whose ...”

“... of the accident was showing signs of recovery. It is not necessary to read Fergusson’s life and, more important, his poems, as a narrative that leads remorselessly to its grim conclusion. In the agitated weeks before his confinement Fergusson is thought to have burned his manuscripts. But between 1765 and the year of his death he had written ...”

“... and now again book of the week here, rediscovery of the century there, and indulgently reviewed more or less everywhere; this uniquely dreary and clothy sprog of the electric 1880s; this un-Austrian Austrian and un-Jewish Jew (Joseph Roth – who has certainly spoiled me for Zweig – was both, to the max); not a pacifist much less an activist but a ...”

“... operation going for him in the forest. And I guess the "robin” means he stole birds.’ Robin is more likely to be a nickname for Robert, though the resonance with ‘robber’ may also count for something, and Hood may suggest his frequent disguises, for Robin is a great trickster whose masquerades inevitably bamboozle his foolish oppressors: he specialises ...”

“... polystyrene enclosures occupied every Advent by Father Christmases in the local department stores more sinister than alluring, I came only belatedly to an interest in grottoes. So too, it seems, did Shakespeare, who never used the word ‘grotto’, not even after the arrival of the French hydraulic engineer and garden designer Salomon de Caus at the Jacobean ...”

“... dated to the Grand Siècle, the time of the voyages to Mughal India of François Bernier or Thomas Coryate. Distinctions between the more advanced European cultures in the volume or quality of travellers’ tales would be difficult to make for most of the modern period. In the Enlightenment, for every Cook there was a ...”

“... Age movement – for it amounts to identifying your self with God. All you need to do is to become more fully conscious of your divinity – to recognise how wonderful, how luminous, you already are. The core of Taylor’s argument is a vigorous and entirely successful criticism of two intertwined bad ideas: that you are wonderful just because you are you, and ...”