“... R.S. Thomas’s four autobiographies (four memoiressays, really) were written in Welsh, and the most substantial of the four – first published in Wales a dozen years ago – was titled Neb, which means ‘nobody’: as in ‘a nobody’ or ‘nobody very special’. And this fits with our uncertain view of Thomas these past four decades ...”

“... whose numbers have been swelling in North Rhine-Westphalia. The New Year’s Eve assaults on more than five hundred women – 31 men have so far been charged, including 18 refugees – have given Cologne a new symbolism. The German far right has got what it wanted: its own version of the Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan attacks, and a ...”

“... London for grill-outs in the wide open spaces of Texas, and criticism began to focus on things more deserving of opprobium than eating too much asparagus or thinking mushy peas were guacamole – waging an illegal war, for example. Whoever the target is, however, the implications of the charge are the same: behind their shutters, in their comfortable ...”

“... lets us like people we wouldn’t in real life.) A difference between them is that TV presenters more often than not share names and, ostensibly, ‘personalities’ with their creators. The alleged confusion this can cause in impressionable viewers is one of the themes of Mark Lawson’s new novel, Going out Live, or Are They the Same at ...”

“... will see that the creator of the site is a unicycling enthusiast – committed to minimalism in more ways than one.By some extraordinary coincidence (oh all right, the odds are so tiny it’s clearly no coincidence at all) tinyurl.com/dick takes you to the homepage of Vice-President Dick Cheney, part of www.whitehouse. gov. In a different universe, it ...”

“... definitively with one view or another, though he expresses healthy doubts about some of the more ‘fabulous stories of the poets’ – that Prometheus moulded the first people out of clay, for example – and the ‘no less incredible’ theories of some philosophers, such as Empedocles’ idea that ‘in the beginning individual members were produced ...”

“... was silly and arbitrary that novelists had to be under 40 to be considered, and that it should be more important that they’re new than that they’re young. Jack agreed. Few I suspect would go as far as John Sutherland (64) – the irrepressible champion of Salman Rushdie (55), whose most recent novel, Fury, wasn’t otherwise very well received – who has ...”

“... in Burlington, Washington, who in the spring was banned from teaching the theory. Evolution is a more satisfying explanation of life than intelligent design/creationism – or anything else that’s been so far proposed – because it doesn’t require the existence of anything for which there is no evidence (which isn’t to say it shouldn’t be discarded ...”

“... revulsion – strong enough to force him off the throne – against his irresponsible hedonism.’ More truly remarkable, and nothing to do with hindsight, is that Worsthorne should think wanting to marry a divorcee an instance of irresponsible hedonism. Worsthorne is evasive, or at least ambiguous, about the extent to which membership of the aristocracy is ...”

“... A creative artist has to be painfully honest with himself,’ R.S. Thomas declared in his autobiography, Neb: He has to look as objectively as possible at his creations. What is the point of pretending that his poem is a good one if it is not? But can the same honesty be expected of other people? Are not so many of life’s activities a means of escaping from self-knowledge? How many people could persevere, if they knew in their hearts they were quite unimportant ...”

“... India who adopted the practice. Having your menagerie painted was also expensive: Martin imported more than 17,000 sheets of fine watercolour paper. Indian artists worked in traditional stone-based pigments and used Mughal techniques, but took European natural history images as their models. Shaikh Zain ud-Din, one of the earliest and best practitioners of ...”

“... Edward Thomas​ believed that up to about the age of four what he called ‘a sweet darkness’ enfolded him ‘with a faint blessing’. It was, though, a darkness and the blessing was faint. ‘From an early age’, Jean Moorcroft Wilson writes, Thomas ‘felt cursed by a self-consciousness he believed the chief cause of his later problems and depression ...”

“... yourself. Then we began to go through the details of the death certificate. Name: Hugh Swynnerton Thomas. Date of death: 7 May 2017. Your relation to him? Son. A few years ago, when I asked my father why he wasn’t going to the house in south-west France where he had for several summers spent a few weeks, his answer sounded straightforward. ‘Too far from ...”

“... had contributed to the formation of this austere doctrine, and though quite often subjected to more severe scrutiny than literary journalism normally attracts, the early essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ remained influential, and suited the New Criticism well. As Gordon suggests, we have moved on from there, not just because we like gossip ...”

“... Amendment.’ Contemporary uses of the term seemed equally unclear to him, amounting to little more than slogans to whip up publicity for the speaker or denounce his or her enemies. As the leading First Amendment scholar Frederick Schauer noted in 1992, ‘there seems to be little free inquiry about free inquiry and little free speech about free ...”