“... that increasingly, as the century went on, people thought of their private lives as far more authentic than their working lives, even though work had the immense moral force of being dutiful. Karlin reports that ‘more volumes of poetry appeared in the 19th century than in the two preceding ones combined.’ It ...”

“... beside a muzzled bore, When the Rudyards cease from Kipling     And the Haggards Ride no more. The Haggards have ridden rather precariously since the decline of Empire, if at all. But the next few years promise no end of Kipling. When copyright runs out, his work will be published extensively in paperback, and may or may not be read. Kipling is a ...”

“... as a private detective watching the jewels at the Claudius-Gertrude wedding feast, may have said more than he knew. Yet to praise Hamlet as the first detective story makes sense mainly in terms of a conceit, feasible partly because ridiculous. Literary artists have worked in the genre: Poe, Wilkie Collins, Simenon, Chandler and Michael Innes among ...”

“... something of an academic flop later on. A passionate left-wing polemicist, he nonetheless retained more than a few traces of his public-school breeding, including a plummy accent and a horde of posh friends. He combined cultural Englishness with political cosmopolitanism, and detested political personality cults while sedulously cultivating a public image of ...”

“... that way the previous October, at St Giles Circus, to see the hanging, drawing and quartering of Thomas Harrison, the first of the regicides, and he was no more pleased with the congestion then. Citizens in Restoration London were obsessed with the nearness of death, also with shaving minutes off everything you could shave ...”

“... to play Dorothy, but Ross’s evident sense of failure and existential torpor make her Dorothy a more interesting character than the pre-teen played by Garland. Ross’s Dorothy is hemmed in, frightened of ‘feeling’, given to anxious but sharp observations: ‘I can’t see how going south of 125th Street ever made anybody’s life better.’ She ...”

“... at the Brynmor Jones Library in Hull. He told Amis he was going into hospital that day for more tests – ‘only tests, but of course they are looking for something, and I bloody well hope they don’t find it.’ Still, he tried not to sound too downcast. ‘Don’t get unduly alarmed; the doctors, as always, are cheerful and light-hearted, but I ...”

“... said some colleagues wouldn’t join events with the word ‘refugee’ in the programme: ‘Thomas Mann was a refugee, but we don’t remember him as a “refugee writer”. The classification is problematic.’ Two novels published in English last year reject the paradigm. The Lebanese author Hoda Barakat’s Voices of the Lost came to attention after ...”

“... what remained of Poland’s Jews. They had a hard time. Of what once amounted to a community of more than three and a half million people, the remnants barely number five thousand. Niezabitowska and Tomaszewski had to travel hundreds of kilometres around Lublin to find a minyan (the ten adult males needed for communal prayer), and among them were two old ...”

“... they can be physically turned the other way up. In Upon the Pun Hammond and Hughes argue that a more promising way for them to have been presented is with a mirror on a table beneath the picture. Arcimboldo’s patron, Rudolf II, would have said: ‘Come and see my new painting of the vegetable gardener.’ The visitor replies: ‘I see no gardener, O Holy ...”

“... for them. A TV station must have seemed cheap by comparison, and has given the Sheikhdom more visibility and prestige than it has ever had. Encouraged by the response to his action, Hamad allowed women to vote and to stand as candidates against men in municipal elections in 1999. This was a shot across the Saudi bows and was recognised as ...”

“... the established image of ‘Françafrique’ as a fount of neocolonial malice. Colonisations is more interesting, in part because it takes the form of a ‘histoire régressive’. The book consists of five hefty sections – each a book in its own right – whose stories unfold in reverse chronological order.It is tempting to begin with the last section ...”

“... As we grow older,’ Lucchesi says at sixty, alone, at his desk, ‘we grow more extremely ourselves. Contact depresses us; conversation debilitates.’ Words spoken with forced eloquence, like a bad classical actor in an old movie. And yet, except for hiding himself behind collective pronouns, Lucchesi spoke sincerely ...”

“... Gates and George Soros, the CEOs of Google, IBM, Intel, eBay, as well as court-philosophers like Thomas Friedman. The true conservatives today, they argue, are not only the old right, with its ridiculous belief in authority, order and parochial patriotism, but also the old left, with its war against capitalism: both fight their shadow-theatre battles in ...”

“... and 20th-century poets who for the most part have endured long periods of neglect: John Clare, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Raymond Roussel, John Wheelwright, Laura Riding and David Schubert. ‘I myself value Schubert more than Pound or Eliot,’ Ashbery says, and one can imagine some members of his audience gasping. In the ...”