“... the mental space of diaries at large. But let it be admitted first that whatever else a journal may or may not be good for, it is a good subject for the attentions of an editor. By definition attuned to the private and familiar (and to perceiving them as familiar), the journal necessarily calls for the services of an ...”

“... Samuel Johnson, Ezra Pound and Robert Lowell have done such marvellous things. A verse translation may aim to be an independent modern work in its own right. Or, I ought rather to say, this is what some famous and admired translations have in fact been. If you took Pope seriously as to the degree of fidelity required of a translator of Homer (‘to copy him in ...”

“... objective and the legitimate location of (post-)German (post-)national policy. Merkel herself may have preferred Europe for more than just historical reasons. The kind of political decision-making she favours closely resembles that characteristic of the EU: decontextualized, event-driven, legitimised by expert opinion rather than agreed through public ...”

“... both Lowe-Porter and Woods lucid and serviceable. If there are faults apart from the mistakes, it may be that she is a little too stuffy and he is a little too snappy. Woods has done a version of Dr Faustus, from which I quoted above, since the time of Buck’s writing. But the question in relation to parody is in any case one of tone rather than ...”

“... the poor ‘are the unhappy persons who, in the great lottery of life, have drawn a blank’. We may act to ease misery from time to time, but many apparently soft-hearted attempts to uplift the wretched of the earth wind up increasing overall suffering. Poor relief only encourages its recipients to breed more of their like, so reducing each individual’s ...”

“... Can those who oppose the death penalty escape cruelty? Nietzsche intimates that cruelty may well be primary. It can be repressed, which is a way of turning cruelty on oneself, or directed towards others in some moralised version, for example by preferring imprisonment to the death penalty (protracted cruelty, that is, over immediate death). The ...”

“... in the body or natural expression … in spite of high critical advice’. Above all, Collins may well have been transferring to another art form his own indignation that many considered the novel merely a form of popular entertainment rather than great literature. Collins’s aversion to connoisseurs and collectors found expression again four years later ...”

“... friendship, sex and knowledge. If some lotus-eating visionaries are to be believed, computers may even have a spiritual dimension: as they grow ever more powerful, they have the potential to become our ‘mind children’. At some point – the ‘singularity’ – in the not-so-distant future, we humans will merge with these silicon creatures, thereby ...”

“... efforts to purge the monarchy of the taint of libertinism left behind by Charles II’, and so he may well have designed the room ‘with this reformist agenda in mind’. That William would have found Venus ashamed less rather than more exciting than Venus asleep is questionable, but she was at least acknowledging that her behaviour did raise moral ...”

“... of the asylum claims considered there are rejected. The young man I spoke to believes – and he may well be right – that the high turnover ensures a profit for the private company that runs Harmondsworth. The company, United Kingdom Detention Services (UKDS), is a subsidiary of Sodexho. I asked under the Freedom of Information Act for the value of ...”

“... I’m low, I must confess, and need a prop     For a project sagging even as I speak. May I rehearse to you da capo (from the top)     The reasons why my outlook seems so bleak     In the herring-scented streets of Reykjavik? I have one precedent I can rely on: Your own impulsive Letter to Lord Byron. I can’t cast you as you cast suave ...”

“... succeeded thanks to his own vandalism and Forster’s loyal destructions and suppressions. We may speculate, but we will never know the inner Dickens which those burned papers would have revealed. The biographer must remain for ever fenced-off. Kaplan’s is an academic’s view of things. For him and his university-based colleagues biographies, like ...”

“... not readily imitable. Although Hoggart is now the only one of this trio still alive, many readers may have the vague impression that he has nothing left to say. The peak of his fame came in the late Fifties and early Sixties, and his later writing has never achieved the same impact. By publishing an autobiography, the last volume of which appeared when he was ...”

“... the crowded dailiness which so stubbornly resists the unthinkable thought that one’s whole life may be about to collapse into barbarism, torture and insanity. The Age of Wonders tells first of Austria in the Thirties and of a family which is in no way saved from anti-semitic horror by the plea that the paterfamilias (an intellectual, a writer, and a ...”

“... over my body too. The immobile is in a fixed, restful state, whereas ‘motion, however swift it may seem, tends essentially towards immobility, and thus, however slowly it may sometimes appear to do so, continually conducts bodies towards death.’ The Bathroom may sound offputtingly ...”