“... is a kind of drab olive; in the Rylands, with the sun coming through the windows, it is brighter, more like light khaki, setting off the black ink of its text very clearly. The text itself, on one side of the fragment, comes from John 18, the passage in which Pilate asks: ‘What is truth?’ The other thing that de Hamel’s reproduction can’t show, but ...”

“... fomented the Phoenix Park murders of Chief Secretary Lord Frederick Cavendish and Under-Secretary Thomas Burke, who had in reality been killed (on 6 May 1882) by Parnell’s bitter enemies the Invincibles. The Times in 1887 had made many other charges under the heady influence of a group of clever and unscrupulous young Irish Unionists who had captured the ...”

“... and John Whitworth; from Aidan Carl Mathews (another besides ‘Severances’); from Thomas Shapcott (who may be Australian – we aren’t told) and from Peter Bland (probably, by the same token, a New Zealander); and from U. A. Fanthorpe (two). One of the Fanthorpe poems gets, reasonably enough, the third prize of £500, Bland gets ...”

“... at all. And she is good at describing that great tradition of our literature, from Caedman to R.S. Thomas, which transforms the parochial into the universal. A highly literate Church has not limited itself to the Word, but has scribbled its brilliant way into drama, poetry, science and fiction. Miss Drabble’s map is sign-posted all over with cloisters and ...”

“... being so upset that he did not come (she had cooked pheasant, John drove to the station) and, more interestingly, out of her decision to grovel rather than embarrass, and annoy, Herman by saying, here is the original letter, why on earth did you pretend to send a carbon? She knew, of course, Herman would never forgive her if he was humiliated; anxious to ...”

“... socks, Woodbines – the mood is ominous. The poem ends with a reference to the death of Edward Thomas. Lewis himself was killed in 1944.Sarah Moss’s new novel is set in a lochside cabin park in the Trossachs. The poem behind its title is William Watson’s ‘The Ballad of Semmerwater’, about a city lost beneath a lake. But Lewis’s poem seems truer ...”

“... What a pleasure​ to return to Thomas Hardy. For about a hundred pages. Then the torment begins, and we’re not even halfway through. From now on each turn of the page will expose the reader to greater unhappiness. There’s a moment in The Return of the Native where the main character, Clym, already deeply troubled by his mother’s mysterious death, goes out of his way to find a little boy who may be able to tell him exactly what happened ...”

“... or to The Archers. The self-awareness of the novel in regard to its public is curiously subtle. Thomas Mann and Arnold Bennett would have taken it for granted, like Scott, that though their reconstructions might not appeal to everyone, they would be read by a complete cross-section of the reading public, from the discerning connoisseur to those who were ...”

“... marble to evoke the canyon of the Sutjeska River in Bosnia-Herzegovina (the site of one of the more famous of Tito’s offensives). The Neoclassical Foreign Ministry across the road is hidden by scaffolding. On the pedestrianised Knez Mihajlova Street, the American and French cultural centres are still vandalised and daubed with anti-Nato graffiti, but ...”

“... past to assume, first, that we can confidently identify something called lesbian sexuality (or, more generally, homosexuality); second, that this form of sexuality has always existed (largely repressed and hence mute in earlier ages, now in the 20th century explicit and manifest); and consequently, third, that it has a history? We can get a sense of what is ...”

“... Benjamin, but it was clear that for Berger the difficulties of a painter of our time involved more than lack of technique or talent. It was a matter of how art meshed with the other cogs in the machine of history. Picasso could be a genius without being a great painter, if the possibility of greatness was precluded by the nature of the world he had been ...”

“... escaped. With battlefields turned beneath the plough, the countryside entered an era of more fundamental change prompted by improved communications, as illustrated by canals and turnpikes, and by the redistribution of land through Parliamentary enclosure. Side by side with these changes, the country mansion came into its own, with landscape ...”

“... having stripes affords camouflage and, all else being equal, tigers that are camouflaged have more viable offspring than tigers that don’t. But bear in mind that the adaptivity of a phenotypic trait is its contribution to fecundity in the environment in which it was selected; not (or not necessarily) in the environment that it currently occupies. A ...”

“... Another antiquary who was at Hougoumont, John Gage (1786-1842), left an account that is more personal and more chilling than Scott’s, in a journal kept during a visit that was, for him too, a first taste of foreign travel. Gage was 29 in the summer of 1815. From an old-established family of Suffolk gentry he was ...”

“... many women in famous movements) she wasn’t the first to get noticed. After two decades and four more books with small presses, Wesleyan University Press put forward a fine selected poems, Veil, in 2001. In 2009 her tenth book, Versed, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. The same things that make her work easy to recognise make ...”