“... suggestive enormity: ‘Saw a strange thing happen – a door opened – of which I must not say more.’ Or, just as a terrifyingly deformed portrait can be consigned to the attic, so can the diarist exert all his powers of literary subterfuge to hide the truth from his reader and from himself. The chronicle begins in 1897 when Arthur Benson was 35 and a ...”

“... and diplomatic tasks which confronted her. ‘The plain fact which cannot be obscured,’ Sir Thomas Inskip, the Minister for the Co-ordination of Defence, said in February 1938, ‘is that it is beyond the resources of this country to make proper provision in peace for the defence of the British Empire against three major powers in three different ...”

“... as poet, a memorable feat in wry self-satire: the train jolting the poet through life bears a much more generalised and abstract significance than Larkin’s Saturday carriage, which keeps its ‘slow and stopping curve’. Somewhere in the future is the last stop. No, they said, it’s the last start, the little one; yes, the one that doesn’t last. In the ...”

“... to produce the works for the Jeff Koons Room inside, had kept to schedule with Puppy and no more greenery had been required since Saturday. For this reason a member of the autonomous Basque police, the Ertzaintza, checked the numberplate of the van – and found it to be false. When he asked for identification, he was shot in the back (and died the next ...”

“... well as desirable. Christianity will of course continue, and today in Africa there are immensely more Christians than ever before; but its assumptions will no longer be the same. The unconverted heathen, on a missionary perspective, are now resident in Britain, not in Borrioboola Gha. Adrian Hastings seems right to tell us that in 1960, the misnamed ‘Year ...”

“... to be both rackety and self-preoccupied. This he doubtless knew too, and there is something more than touching in this comment from his journal: Ida finds subtle and deep reasons for admiring The Fountain. I quickly suppressed my almost Pavlovian sneer at Charles Morgan, and realised that what she found in the book is the thing that matters. (Not that ...”

“... me shins. Your hand is too cold for all and aught.’ According to the book’s epigraph from Sir Thomas Browne, the considering man ‘may conceive himself in some manner to have lived from the beginning of the world’, so that the relationship between tale and teller appears in different styles and places. In this way we get, appropriately, some familiar ...”

“... that it’s time for her meeting with Bernard Stonestreet, an ad exec in ‘a Paul Smith suit, more specifically the 118 jacket and the 11T trouser’. Cayce, by contrast, wears a ‘museum-grade replica of a US MA-1 flying jacket . . . created by Japanese obsessives’. Afterwards there’s lunch, ‘the food California-inflected Vietnamese fusion with ...”

“... relations in the United States. Despite the twists and turns of official policy – from Thomas Jefferson’s efforts to assimilate Indians by teaching them to farm (even though they had been doing so for centuries), to Andrew Jackson’s Indian removal, Grant’s ‘peace policy’ and Roosevelt’s Indian New Deal – the fact is that whites from ...”

“... the short-story writer, whose little dyspeptic jolts are sharp and entertaining – was nothing more than a high-functioning literary troll. You almost feel her perched on your shoulder as you read, jeering at you for wanting to enjoy fiction. ‘Oh, do you want your characters to be likeable? Do you want a story? Are you bored? Do you want some ...”

“... main thread of the tale is a travel-book, but around this cluster a number of other themes: the more or less eccentric persons met en route, some love-complications, the bees themselves and the details of their nurture, a good deal of natural history, Darwinian speculations and their impact on an enterprising field naturalist. The group soon run into the ...”

“... logic. Mind you, its relentlessness doesn’t render it faultless, and at times there even is more relentlessness than logic. Freud in particular has become Szasz’s bugbear; the anti-psychoanalytic psychoanalyst is no longer able to view this genius’s work dispassionately. While he is right, of course, in suggesting that Freud played a founding role ...”

“... or imprison anyone who practised without its permission, imprisoned a Cambridge-trained physician, Thomas Bonham, for practising in London without the college’s licence. Giving judgment in his favour on his claim for false imprisonment, the chief justice, Sir Edward Coke, fastened on the impropriety of allowing a regulatory body to impose fines which went ...”

“... wholly physical or material in nature.’ Strawson’s argument builds on arguments made famous by Thomas Nagel. According to Nagel, no amount of purely physical information about what goes on in a creature’s brain (he used a bat as his example) can tell us ‘what it is like’ to be that creature. In this sense, objective physical science radically omits ...”

“... of Beauties of Sterne, the Wit and Wisdom of Sir Walter Scott, George Eliot’s Sayings, or the Thomas Hardy Calendar, and the few who have actually looked inside such volumes will have done so only because the ‘real’ copy of the novel they were seeking had already been taken out of the library. Trained in a system which encourages the dutiful reading ...”