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“... they collected 16th and 17th-century books and manuscripts, learned booty which was much easier to find than it later became, and pored unsupervised over ancient documents in virtually unexplored public and private collections. They worked heroically and announced their discoveries with extraordinary fervour. They met, ...”

“... but ridiculed Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina in unusually personal terms, alluding to his speech impediment. ‘He shows an incapacity of accuracy,’ Sumner declared. ‘He cannot open his mouth, but out there flies a blunder.’ Brooks was Butler’s second cousin (political leaders in South Carolina all seemed ...”

“... are not, even if someone who is clearly Shuggie puts in a cameo appearance, asking Mungo Hamilton for advice outside a pawnbroker’s. (The boys are of an age: Shuggie is sixteen at the end of Shuggie Bain, Mungo fifteen during the events of Young Mungo.) Awkward, angular, posh-sounding, black-haired youths wanting ...”

“... the sturdy civic virtue of Cato and Brutus, and their idea of republican self-government indebted to Greco-Roman models, the founders of American independence deferred to the authority of the ancients, even as they embarked on a revolutionary political experiment. George Washington, for example, identified himself with Cato ...”

“... There is nothing like the threatened demise of a newspaper to bring out a journalist’s sentimentality. The disclosure, some weeks ago, that the 201-year-old Observer was to be sold, and might disappear, was the occasion for some stirring comment about the paper, both from people who properly respect its liberal traditions and from people who have spent years talking it down ...”

“... who was an admirer – of why that might be a pity, and why, ice-caps permitting, we might come to regret it. Gerald Basil Edwards was born on Guernsey in 1899 and died in Weymouth in 1976, after a life spent largely in English exile, and lived largely in obscurity, first as a schoolmaster and civil servant, and then as a mordant recluse. (There isn’...”

“... may have missed a few, this is the 25th volume of Ezra Pound’s highly distinctive correspondence to see the light of day. The first selection of his letters, edited by D.D. Paige and culled from the years 1907-41, was published in 1950, when Pound was four years into what would be a 12-year sojourn in St Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, ...”

“... This​ book is a departure from John Carey’s normal mode, much more intently introductory than anything else he has written in a long and distinguished career. A Little History of Poetry canters from Gilgamesh and Homer to Mary Oliver and Les Murray in three hundred pages with a breezy sense of mission, assuming in the reader no previous acquaintance with the subject (‘Confessional poetry is poetry that reveals personal confidences, especially relating to mental illness and hospitalisation’) or indeed with other sorts of knowledge that might be thought fairly general (‘Totalitarian regimes seek to control every aspect of life, including writing ...”

“... and think this is a classic example of an aporia: since it is physically impossible for McCarthy to stick something up his bollocks, what Keane is actually signalling, in making an unfulfillable request, is that he doesn’t want to play in the World Cup. In the evening, ...”

“... On 21 December​ 1859 John Tyndall, a professor of natural philosophy at the Royal Institution, set out to measure the structure and movements of the Mer de Glace, a glacier above Chamonix. In previous summers he had collected data on several Alpine glaciers, but no one had ever attempted to do so in winter ...”

“... What to make​ of him? The man is a shock, like the toy buzzer in a prank handshake, and the effect is to baffle and immobilise thought. Consider a typical reaction from the morning after the election, Aaron Sorkin’s rant on the Vanity Fair website: ‘The Klan won last night ...”

“... This makes the rest of the world uncomfortable, and Madison’s ideas can often seem too American to be true (in contrast to Rousseau, whose ideas can often seem too true to be Swiss). The other, Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès from Provence, is not mistrusted outside his native France so much as ...”

“... it is not his element, which is probably why he spends so much time on it. He does not claim to be a world-class sailor, though he is obviously a competent one. One good reason for sailing is that, being a writer, he likes to write about having sailed. Sailing is guaranteed ...”

“... subject is in a state of acute crisis. Some nourish the suspicion that English literature isn’t properly an academic subject, while others believe that its study can be revitalised by adopting structuralist procedures and developing a ‘materialist criticism’. Partly, the crisis which now afflicts English studies is a reflection of a more general ...”

“... Harold Nicolson was a diarist of genius who would have loved to make a success of public life or literature. He was an able but not outstanding diplomat who retired at 43, a journalist and broadcaster of talent, an MP for ten years and a junior minister in 1940-41. His literary achievements were voluminous, but few of his forty-odd books have lasted, apart from his study of Curzon, his lives of King George V and of Tennyson, and his Byron, The Last Phase ...”