“... in wilful collective hallucination, the abbey and its visitors mostly ignore them. As Robert Musil said, writing before BLM, ‘there is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument.’ The abbey’s audio guide – the English version is mellifluously narrated by Jeremy Irons – mentions them only in brief asides about Poets’ Corner and a ...”

“... family life could mesh with a fear that creation itself was in such jeopardy that any attempt at self-expression – whether in art, politics or religion – was irrelevant and even fatuous. You could imagine this dilemma inspiring a perverse comedy (think of Billy Wilder or Paul Thomas Anderson running it, let alone Preston Sturges) in which a respected ...”

“... letters’ in an antique shop in Arezzo. Whether 19th-century or 21st, the tale has echoes of Robert Browning’s discovery in Florence in June 1860, at the market in the Piazza di San Lorenzo, of a collection of documents relating to a Roman murder case from 1698. ‘The old yellow book’, as Browning came to refer to it, formed the basis of his ...”

“... of vision’. They remind us we’re watching a ‘mediated form of seeing’.The self-referentiality of A Matter of Life and Death anticipates The Red Shoes, with its reflection on the process (and the psychological cost) of making art and cinema. Like its predecessor, the film has two contrasting modes of representation. A fantasy ballet ...”

“... speaker writes home to his mother about his brother’s arrest. Poetry satisfied the ‘need for self-expression at a formative period of my life’. But politics came with it: Johnson joined the British Black Panther Party while still at school, and was introduced to Black consciousness literature for the first time: W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black ...”

“... That could only be done when men reformed themselves to do their duty to God, to neighbour and to self. More’s arguments, heavily salted with abuse after the manner of the time, are couched in Latin, so as to contain the dispute among those who could read that language: ‘Quid respondet frater, pater, potator?’ What answer from this crapulous father ...”

“... also inspired two of the true jewels and masterworks of science fiction’s ‘Golden Age’ – Robert A. Heinlein’s stories ‘By His Bootstraps’ (1941) and ‘All You Zombies’ (1959) – may be less well known. In these stories the protagonist, travelling into the past (and having to do so repeatedly in order to try to correct the damage wreaked by ...”

“... must have written it. ‘The autistic mind, it was supposed at that time, was incapable of self-understanding and understanding others and therefore of authentic introspection and retrospection,’ Sacks wrote. ‘How could an autistic person write an autobiography? It seemed a contradiction in terms.’ As late as 2001, the epidemiologist Walter ...”

“... of a dissolute father and an unstable mother, he was born with a club foot, which always made him self-conscious,’ he says of Byron; and of Dickinson, no less winningly: ‘She was reclusive, tended to wear white clothing, which was thought odd, and scarcely left her bedroom in her later years.’ Such things strike a whimsical note, but usually Carey’s ...”

“... of the 19th century and as far from a good Samaritan as anyone could imagine. Restell was a self-publicist on an epic scale who was said to possess an ‘inordinate greed for money’. She marketed herself as an exotic Frenchwoman with decades of training in women’s medicine when she was really a seamstress from a small town in the Cotswolds who never ...”

“... Chief among these is ‘sprawl’, defined as ease, cheerful excess, unbuttonedness and unsnobbish self-confidence: ‘Sprawl is really classless ... Sprawl is loose-limbed in its mind.’ Murray’s verse really does sprawl, and there’s a lot of it: some is blustery, sloppy or hard to listen to. His work flaunts its roughness, its male friendliness, its ...”

“... puts it, ‘21st-century everything’. Everything on the point of collapse.Weather is made up of self-contained paragraphs like the following, which is not just characteristic but paradigmatic of the book’s concerns: ‘Eli [Lizzie’s young son] is at the kitchen table, trying all his markers one by one to see which still work. Ben [her husband] brings ...”

“... capitalism would eventually, peacefully, deliver the fruits of modernisation – a non-violent, self-reinforcing alternative to expropriation and collectivisation. It wasn’t clear, however, how traditional societies would respond to the inevitable disruption associated with integration into the global economy. ‘How,’ Rostow asked, ‘should the ...”

“... the relationship. In Keep the Aspidistra Flying, George Orwell gave his friendless, dowdy and self-pitying protagonist, Comstock, one true pal: the editor and patron Ravelston, proprietor of the small yet reliable magazine Antichrist. This Ravelston – some composite of Sir Richard Rees and John Middleton Murry – was a hedonistic yet guilt-ridden ...”

“... level the story he has to tell is unusually interesting, beginning with that intellectually self-improving father. His parents were assimilated German-speaking Jews, Habsburg subjects before 1919, and thereafter citizens of the new state of Czechoslovakia (where it seemed wise to speak Czech, at least in public). Prague in the interwar years was ...”