“... on the page. The excuse for its first appearance is that it leads into a discussion about Richard III’s ugliness, which compelled him to make his essential self a not-self and absolutely strong; whereas Don Giovanni, introduced for contrast, has an existential self, and ‘the existential drive evolves into an infinite series’ – hence the list ...”

“... and the crumbling of services on a scale that would have gladdened the ruralist heart of a Richard Jefferies. Five years ago, Roy Porter still diagnosed ‘a downward spiral of infrastructural and human problems that will prove hard to halt’. Yet now, when London has slipped way down the table of city-sizes and tours round the eerie magnificence of ...”

“... something else again’ in the course of his alphabet-surfing. The fairy realm of the féth fíada may not only be contiguous to ours but ‘contaygious’ too (the book’s fourth section takes its title from a ballad beginning ‘In Egypt’s land, contaygious to the Nile’). Where Auden has given us the Lords of Limit, Muldoon gives us Lords of ...”

“... of Eliot’s reputation. Ploughing through these packed and not always fascinating columns may tell us as much about the craft, if that is the right word, of highbrow reviewing as it does about Eliot. On the English side one notices a steady reduction in pomposity, signalled by the disappearance of the reviewer’s plural first-person pronoun – a ...”

“... a weight of psychological and religious investment to be abandoned with impunity. But, as Galileo may or may not have whispered after his 1632 recantation, things do in the end move: for Romans the (imaginary) Rhipaean Mountains retreat further and further as exploration forces back the boundaries of the unknown; the Earth ...”

“... we are all about to be nuked, and the next, we go back to arguing about Jeremy Corbyn. Theresa May’s surprise announcement of a snap election – surprising only because she’d spent the last nine months telling us it wasn’t going to happen – immediately wiped North Korea from the headlines, and returned the spotlight to another, more drawn-out ...”

“... on their foreign debts. But somehow Khodorkovsky took it all too far, or too seriously. As Richard Sakwa describes in voluminous detail in his book on the Yukos affair, Khodorkovsky began trying to break the government monopoly on oil pipelines, planning an independent Yukos pipeline to China; and he also began negotiating a huge share swap, in essence ...”

“... faith in the canon and turning to different forms of cultural studies. But their disillusion may be premature. English poetry has not been as one-sidedly conservative as is frequently supposed, and needs defending against many of its defenders – whether overt reactionaries or ‘liberal humanists’ who display an extraordinary complacency about the ...”

“... dear and one of the funniest grotesques in America’, accepted the ‘stipend’ on behalf of ‘Richard Python’. ‘The great fiction story is now being rehearsed before our very eyes, in the Nixon administration,’ Corey announced. He described Gravity’s Rainbow as ‘a small contribution to a certain degree, since there are over three and a half ...”

“... He had flu and had lost his voice, but he didn’t let that put him off. He arranged to have Richard Wollheim read his paper out for him. As the paper was mellifluously read, in cadences quite unlike Freddie’s own clipped and headlong mode of speech (‘prshn’ for ‘proposition’), he nodded his vigorous assent to the arguments that were being ...”

“... it ‘easier for the dominators and predators who prosper in a Hobbesian or Sadean world’, one may agree that all these things are as bad as he says, while questioning whether they’re any worse than the intellectual atmosphere revealed by his own bludgeoning style and the vulgar facility of his mental transitions. I wonder, too, whether the connection ...”

“... secrecy is that any government which reveals how its predecessors spied upon their own populace may also face some embarrassing queries as to what comparable actions it is getting up to itself today. It is, at first sight, odd that we know a great deal more about the more necessarily secret world of military and foreign intelligence. The reasons for this ...”

“... invention, elements of an intended meaning, and they come trailing all kinds of associations which may not have much to do with their material locations out there in the world. The ‘brilliant’, the ‘deep blue’ New England air and the irremediable Californian innocence that crop up so frequently in Superior Women really belong to literature or mythology ...”

“... worth the delay, which mimes its readers’ prurient flutter at the sexy-sounding word. Sterne may have picked up a few tips from Harington. The main reason jovial, learned, scatological Harington isn’t better known is that he spread his energies so widely among diverse literary kinds. He is best known as a translator rather than an inventor. The story ...”

“... is mushy at best, resting, not on respect, but on a caprice that might be withdrawn, and which may even imply the fascist notion that the lives of animals are somehow forfeit to humans but can be redeemed by an act of clemency or leniency on the part of the boss species. His very terminology does violence to the pro-animal arguments of such Victorians as ...”