“... Paris in December 1896, ‘a popular legend of base instincts, rapacious and violent.’ ‘What more is possible?’ W.B. Yeats, who was in attendance, recalled in his autobiography. ‘After us the Savage God.’ Was the uproarious Ubu an early intimation of his ‘rough beast’ slouching towards Bethlehem? Ubu roi is also a Second Coming of sorts, and ...”

“... spires and all the things that lived along the Thames; the early drawings show experiments with a more sail-like structure, a right-angled pyramid, dynamically spiralling upwards but tethered to the urban surface. You can still see this conceptual Shard in the building there today, with its deconstructed summit a refraction of Hawksmoor, and making it look as ...”

“... That is, after all, only to say of writing what is true of any human action: intentions are a lot more complicated and people less self-acquainted than you might think.But Lawrence was referring to something more mysterious than that. He was saying that the tale and its artist are intrinsically opposed to each other, that ...”

“... The​ Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus liked to look on the bright side. True, that hasn’t been the usual assessment: his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) was intended to drench the parade of Enlightenment optimism about human possibility. The Radical writer Richard Price reckoned that an expanding population was a good thing, and that it would follow inevitably from more virtuous forms of government ...”

“... band of Pioneers, who are opening the way for the march of the nation across the continent’. More than three thousand copies of The Pioneers were purchased within hours of its publication on 1 February 1823, establishing Cooper as by far the most successful American novelist of his time. The following year the Atlantic published an imaginary dialogue ...”

“... and sometimes, in the 20th, that Continental essayistic tradition which permits a writer like Thomas Mann or Jacques Rivière to produce a kind of fattened philosophy. During the Fifties, Murdoch exchanged her Existentialism for a loosely Christian Platonism, which has been the fabric of her worldview ever since. (Her Gifford Lectures, published as ...”

“... marble busts on the walls. I noticed Ascherson was taking his time over an inscription to the poet Thomas Campbell, and some words of Campbell’s began to echo somewhere in my head, two lines from The Pleasures of Hope. ‘Tis distance lends enchantment to the view, And robes the mountain in its azure hue. Not good lines, but they seemed good enough as I ...”

“... as unlucky to dislodge, actually the site of an Iron Age enclosure’. I thought the English were more hard-headed than this, that it was the superstitious Irish who didn’t dislodge fairy forts for fear of reprisals from the gentle folk, a term not included by Dolan, though it does appear in the 1996 Concise Ulster Dictionary edited by C.I. Macafee, which ...”

“... them from the public’. Despite their many imperfections, the early census counts provided a far more robust statistical picture than was previously possible and, by revealing the scale and pace of population growth, Rickman’s tables confounded contemporary assumptions about the relationship between demography and prosperity. Population was a controversial ...”

“... how to do it in ways that evoke the heart of the experience and don’t resort unduly to its more freakish terrors? The wonder of Joe Simpson’s escape back into life is both that he survived near death on the Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes and that he has the power of recall to do justice in vivid and original phrasing to an episode which will ...”

“... This sad fact has been neglected by biologists, who, being – in general – optimists, are far more interested in how new forms of life appear than in how they depart: a philosophy which, as Raup says, is rather like a demographer concentrating on births and forgetting about deaths. Raup is an obituarist. His book, like all good obituaries, tells us ...”

“... pictures which made his reputation. If a little embroidery made the meaning of a story clearer, or more amusing, Capa would sometimes embroider. Richard Whelan, reasonably enough, is not interested in giving Capa good and bad marks for his conduct, but begs almost all the questions about the morality of photographing sadness, sickness and death when he writes ...”

“... for example, is treated at length. Changes in printing methods meant that books became available more widely than ever before in an increasingly literate society. The establishment – particularly the high-minded clergy – were caught in the awkward position of promoting literacy, but at the same time attempting to guide, if not exactly censor, the texts ...”

“... also an individual voice lively enough to resist its seductions. Djuna Barnes doesn’t show any more resistance than her own Felix, who ‘loved that old and documented splendour with something of the love of the lion for its tamer – that sweat-tarnished spangled enigma that, in bringing the beast to heel, had somehow turned towards him a face like his ...”

“... 1850 or 1860 when the ancient universities conspicuously joined the modern world. The trends are more to our liking, or at least we understand them better. The steep climb in matriculations, the diversification of the curriculum, the creation of professional schools, the spread of extra-mural education, the establishment of women’s colleges and the ...”