“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... amused themselves by harassing Papists and ransacking their chapels. Fearing political chaos, the lord mayor led a group of civic and religious leaders in pledging allegiance to the occupying forces, but even in the flush of victory William’s advisers were uneasy. ‘The treatment the king met with from the prince of Orange,’ as one of them put ...”

“... In Lord Dunsany’s​ 1936 novel, Rory and Bran, a fantasia on Irish folk themes, Rory’s parents worry about whether he can be trusted to take the cattle to market on his own. They decide that Bran should escort him, and feel confident that their rather dreamy boy will be well looked after. And so the pair set off ...”

“... sent to prison for twelve months after a gamekeeper catches him poaching. In between he brings home the son he has kept a secret for five years – ‘Yours! How long have it been yours?’ his mother asks; ‘Since ’twas born,’ he replies – and for a time, sacked from the choir when Rev. Scroope hears of his indiscretion, he devotes himself to ...”

“... Secretary of State said that throughout this decade he expected to be able to provide, so far as home students were concerned, for constant student numbers and for constant unit income in real terms. It was not long before that expectation was abandoned. Last Christmas he announced that in the next year there would be a 3½ per cent cut in the grant to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Auden’s quest so soon found its object. Otherwise the start of the war might have fetched him home still on the same tack, 1st September 1939 finding him not in a dive on 52nd Street but in some bleak provincial drill hall having those famous bunyons vetted for service in the Intelligence Corps. Auden might (and some say should) have condemned himself to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... reissue in 1552. In the new 1552 service of Eucharist, the feeling is emphatically of a Reformed Lord’s Supper – not even a Lutheran rite. Not only does it repeatedly shy away from any potentially dramatic liturgical climax until all those present have received the bread and wine – something which already puzzled me when I was in the congregation as a ...”