“... the air of over-interpretation. All these turn up again in Hamlet in Purgatory, but altogether do more to enlighten than to confuse. Perhaps this is because the intellectual shell which enclosed Renaissance Self-Fashioning has dropped away: the faith in progressive authorities from Marx to Lacan and the Fathers of Past and Present; in the middle class as an ...”

“... of the day have been an inordinately long and dangerous journey; for Bloch it was surely no more demanding than the one that had taken him, on numberless youthful occasions, from his family home in the industrial port of Ludwigshafen to the old Palatinate capital of Mannheim on the opposite side of the Rhine. The fairgrounds and circuses and amusement ...”

“... Writer’s block must be thought of as a disease even more specific to a particular occupation than housemaid’s knee or weaver’s bottom. You can have those without being a housemaid or a weaver, but you can’t have writer’s block without being a writer, and a real writer, meaning one who is known at some stage to have written something of substance ...”

“... The first is Eliot’s hypothesis of a 17th-century dissociation of sensibility, here given a more specific formulation in Hobbes’s distinction between locutionary and propositional truth. The second is a Romantic concept of revolution as creative upheaval. The third is a more recent notion of the exhaustion of ...”

“... the other rocky planets of the solar system orbit today, there were once, five billion years ago, more than twenty worlds larger than the Moon, several perhaps as large as Mars. Collisions were common. Rocks brought back from the Moon by the Apollo astronauts tell us that one of these worlds, often known as Theia, hit the still-forming Earth, destroying ...”

“... avoiding everything about it that was not ‘meaning’. Pushkin’s solution was plainer, opener, more sybilline and yet more emphatic. He would take matters to the point at which the reader could take over. Above all, he would have no facile, sentimental or melodramatic endings, no suicides for love or honour, no stock ...”

“... Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, Edmund Burke, Pasquale Paoli, Charles Burney, Thomas Warton and Oliver Goldsmith. Their names appear below the image, cursively engraved, appositely placed: one might almost be looking at a signed group photograph of 18th-century luminaries. In fact the picture is Victorian, painted in about 1845, but the ...”

“... could sweeten their tea with sugar in preference to honey? How many hundreds of thousands more Africans would have had to be heaped onto the scales to weigh more heavily with Pitt than the death of a single European? How many lives of ordinary people would weigh more than the life ...”

“... but as Elizabeth King and David Todd detail, the supposed origin of the machine is supported more by circumstantial evidence than positive proof; it’s an ‘elegant hypothesis’, the authors conclude. More interesting than the clockwork Diego’s uncertain provenance, however, is the tantalising concept of ...”

“... and would like something to counterbalance this. I would like to read about St Francis and St Thomas Aquinas,’ he wrote in his early twenties. He showed an early talent for art, and was sent to the Slade through the benevolence of a local Lady Bountiful. He emerged from it in 1912, an almost dwarfish figure a couple of inches over five feet and weighing ...”

“... kind of work to her. Kumin remembered how Sexton would ‘willingly push a poem through twenty or more drafts’. Beginning with simple couplets and quatrains, she rapidly moved through a series of experiments with poetic forms, including acrostics and villanelles. Never much of a student or serious reader, Sexton knew little ...”

“... Journal of Aesthetics. Part of the theory is derived, unacknowledged, from Saussure, but with the more celebrated, if debatable parts of the Saussurean scheme, such as the arbitrary nature and binary structure of the Saussurean sign, left out. Martin borrows from the psychologist Ulric Neisser a use of the term ‘icon’ which is quite different from that ...”

“... the Austrian village of Willendorf. Tiny yet massive, the figure’s fullness seems sculptural more or less by definition; its display of observation and exaggeration is so expert that, seen in the flesh, it’s a shock to realise how comfortably the carved stone could fit in your hand. Yet its talismanic immediacy makes it seem the embodiment of the ...”

“... defendants, including Diendéré and Compaoré, were indicted in connection with the murder of Thomas Sankara, Compaoré’s predecessor, in 1987. That trial has been suspended until 1 March, but the prosecution is seeking a thirty-year sentence for Compaoré, accusing him of ‘harming state security’, ‘concealment of corpses’ and ‘complicity in ...”

“... of this book, Daniel Grader, sees Macrone as hailing from Scotland, on the say-so of the poet Thomas Moore; others favour the Isle of Man. Hogg met him when he was working as a shopman in Mayfair, and was then published by Macrone when Macrone went into partnership with James Cochrane in Pall Mall. Hogg came to like the two men, together with Cochrane’s ...”