“... by fancy phrases suggests a deeper than aesthetic reaction against what was austerely spun at home. The colour and panache of ‘Snow’ seem to be making up for the dourness of an Ulster childhood. When MacNeice published it in Poems, he put it next to ‘Belfast’, which describes a ‘country of cowled and haunted faces’ where ‘The sun goes down ...”

“... domination than a defensive operation designed to stoke up anti-Iranian and anti-Shia feeling at home – even when the Iranian influence is largely invented. ‘We are a primary target for the Iranian regime,’ MBS said in May, shortly before Trump’s visit, accusing the Iranians of seeking to take over Islamic holy sites in Saudi Arabia. ‘We won’t ...”

“... of the lament, Ariadne’s abandonment is fourfold. Two past abandonments: she abandoned her home and herself, for and to Theseus. Two in the present: abandoned by him, she again abandons herself, this time to her feelings in song. Her self-abandoned expression of abandonment is a hieroglyph of all four abandonings. It is a fundamental part of the male ...”

“... I endeavoured to remove their physical traces. I was born on 5 May 1923, in a London nursing home, which occupied a house in an early 19th-century square. The square, Torrington Square, was destroyed in the war. One side of it still stands as a terrace, but I do not know whether this includes the house where I was born, even though I know the number of ...”

“... patterned, but each sentence is a discrete explosion. There is, for example, the disagreeable Lord von Winternigg in Roth’s greatest novel, The Radetzky March (1932), who rides through the garrison town in his barouche: ‘small, ancient and pitiful, a little yellow oldster with a tiny wizened face in a huge yellow blanket ... he drove through the ...”

“... and happy’. America would have its highway between the oceans, and blacks would have a permanent home where they might enjoy freedom without white recrimination. ‘There is meat in that suggestion, General,’ Lincoln supposedly told Butler. Butler’s story used to be widely accepted. These days, virtually every historian dismisses it. Lincoln’s ...”

“... who recorded that ‘the African (so let me call her, for so in fact she is) took the hint, went home to her master’s, and soon sent what follows.’ In addition to occasional poems prompted by political events or local deaths, Wheatley wrote a number of abstract odes – ‘On Virtue’, ‘On Friendship’, ‘On Imagination’ – in which the language ...”

“... off the English stage for two centuries, introducing the often farcical censorship by the lord chamberlain which was to last into our own day.But there was no worked-out theory of secular free speech until Cato’s notorious letters. These pseudonymous columns, published in the London Journal from 1720 on, provided, from scratch, a fully formed ...”

“... a series of digressions about every subject under the sun. He cannot bear, for example, to mention Lord Balogh, the Balliol don Harold Wilson recruited as an economic adviser in 1964, without telling us what it was like to be an inter-war Hungarian radical under ‘a sclerotic, semi-fascist regime, brooding over its Habsburg past’, or to talk about Norway ...”

“... sexual excitement of the relationship between Oliver Alden and his father’s ship captain, Lord Jim: a relationship which moves through the range of feeling from sexual captivation through the disappointments of an unacknowledged and unconsummated love affair to an ambivalent, sentimental friendship of the kind Santayana himself had with the second ...”

“... of Canada have an embossed red crown on his official stationery? When Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty, George successfully dissuaded him from calling a ship HMS Pitt, because the name was ‘neither euphonious nor dignified’, and the men might invent ‘nicknames of illconditioned words rhyming with it’. And opulence and privilege only ...”

“... has ever made Who’s Who in Australia, though family legend has it that my great grandfather was Lord Mayor of Brisbane for a time in the 1880s ... I have to dress up my material: it is very ordinary stuff.’ This is modest and charming. It will also serve as an introduction to Peter Porter’s primary subject-matter. He is richly intrigued and preoccupied ...”

“... squeezed out of them: in the theatre they provide the vehicles for self-seeking actors, ambitious Lord Chamberlains and profiteers out to make money from evening entertainments. They’re plundered and castrated; so they survive ... A rigid cult would be dangerous, like the ceremonial which forbade Byzantine courtiers to touch the persons of the nobility, so ...”

“... could be formed other than of particular folks. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs brings home the way in which tradition and the individual talent can converge in that astonishing thing, a well-nigh instant authentic tradition. ‘It is a reflection of the proverb’s vitality that new ones are continually being created’; on the other hand (a ...”

“... reconcile this taste for travel with her habit of disciplined contemplation, surely a stay-at-home thing to do. She responds: ‘It’s becoming increasingly difficult to follow you. One travels in order to contemplate. Every trip is contemplation in motion.’ Galey remarks that ‘some great thinkers never left their studies: Descartes sat by his ...”