“... intermittently from the tunnel. For Ruskin, on the other hand, the events speak simply of the power of melody: the bird sings, the people listen. A century later, a nightingale concert in the vegetable gardens of Leicester seems improbable, and we will most likely read Ruskin’s footnote with nostalgia, peering through it, as through a magic window, onto ...”

“... a series of the jealous Queen’s favourites. At the same time she does justice to the imaginative power this matriarchal ancestor of both historical and Gothic fiction still carries, reading it as both ‘an elegy for women’s erasure from history, their exile to some paltry underworld of fantasy and romance’ and as the exemplar of a transhistorical female ...”

“... from the 1840s onwards. One of the Genoveses’ most prominent subjects, the politician James Henry Hammond, provides telling testimony against their thesis. If Hammond was a God-fearing Christian who read his Bible faithfully, he had a strange way of showing it. In the mid-1840s, he was driven from the governor’s mansion in Charleston when word leaked ...”

“... was the first poet I fell in love with as a teenager. My English teacher (who preferred Pope and Henry James) mocked me for my taste, reminding me of Shelley’s description of Wordsworth in ‘Peter Bell the Third’ as ‘a solemn and unsexual man’. Never afraid of being thought either solemn or unsexual I persevered, and even persuaded my history ...”

“... what might he have said about Melvyn Bragg’s sort of thing? There’s a famous bit in one of Henry James’s essays where he says that the trouble with periodical publication is that it’s like a train that has to leave the station every hour, according to the timetable, and if there are no genuine passengers then you have to put in dummies, so that the ...”

“... in films and on television. It is true that a number of influential mavericks – from Nabokov and Henry Miller to William Burroughs, James Baldwin, Philip Roth and the Beats – had been chipping away at the old taboos. But it still took courage to challenge the stultifying pieties of middlebrow culture. Being a woman didn’t help. (Does it ever?) Over the ...”

“... composes feverish letters to current lovers and dead philosophers – was a landmark moment in the power-lifting of Jewish-American fiction. ‘Over the past ten or 15 years,’ Julian Moynihan announced in the New York Times, ‘Jewish writers – Bernard Malamud, J.D. Salinger, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, inter alia – have emerged as a dominant movement in ...”

“... studio, ‘claiming the film had induced a miscarriage’. The strangeness of the film, and its power, come from Browning’s refusal to centre the narrative on the freakishness of the freaks. Instead, they are allowed to fall in love, get involved in treachery and jealousy, be greedy and nasty and horny. This last element is what makes the film subversive ...”

“... and that we cannot always expect its intellectuals to approach us with the colonial cringe of Henry James or T.S. Eliot. Rorty made us realise how much poorer we are if Jefferson, Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, Stowe, Peirce, William James, Santayana and Dewey are not familiar landmarks in our intellectual scenery. And his devotion to the United States as the ...”

“... of 1972, which seemed to end capital punishment for good. In fact, it did nothing of the sort. Henry Furman was a slightly retarded black man who had shot and killed a householder through a closed door in the course of a burglary and was now facing the electric chair in Georgia. He had the good fortune to be represented on appeal by Anthony Amsterdam, a ...”

“... has started to close around Wade. On what seems to be the eve of his arrest, he commandeers a power boat equipped with a radio and lights out into the wilderness, ostensibly in search of his wife. In the days immediately following his – flight? search? breakdown? – Wade radios ever fainter, ever more incoherent ramblings back to the world. And then ...”

“... and the protection of human ‘dignity’ (his word) against the excessive encroachments of state power. His analysis of the grounds of Jung’s statement is, however, worth noting: ‘The defence minister believes what he says. He believes things are the way he says because he says that is the way they are.’ This is not far from John de Baur’s The ...”

“... to help me up – my opinion is changing. I am the old lady falling down and lacking the muscle power to get up. One of the most humiliating conclusions you can come to about yourself: it won’t get better (although the ‘fatness’ is water retention). But now, providing I don’t look at myself in the mirror in the hall, I begin to see (as in feel) that ...”

“... blend of the two, this ‘inner landscape’ gives Modiano’s novels their hallucinatory power: the term ‘psychogeography’ might have been invented with him in mind. His characters are ‘nothing but bubbles, iridescent with the city’s colours’, as he remarks of the couple in his 1981 novel Young Once. Functionally, they are ...”

“... when, in fact, I am in your arms,’ and, with a different sort of feeling, ‘do not exert your power over the sea so as to make it drown me by sympathetic magic’; there is a conscious neatness in the ingenuity of the phrasing, perhaps because the same idea is being repeated, which brings out the change of tone in this verse.Madge is reading from William ...”