“... he left after a year. Abandonment after a few months of the Army career he had chosen involved more debts to be paid by Allan, who for the three years of life remaining to him was intermittently though unsuccessfully dunned by the young man he condemned as ‘destitute of honor & principle every day of his life has only served to confirm his debased ...”

“... length of 323 pages, he argued that no one knows anything, ever did, or could ever do so. How even more ironic, given the success of the scientific method, that the most strident denials of knowledge have been levelled against the sciences. This, too, goes back to the Greeks, especially to Sextus Empiricus, who, in a work called Adversus Mathematicos, offered ...”

“... charged political provocations and resistance.This tradition endures: in the US, seven states and more than three dozen cities now claim sanctuary status, refusing to cooperate with requests from Immigration and Customs Enforcement to detain undocumented immigrants. Churches serve as political sanctuaries, continuing a medieval custom: Francisca Lino, a ...”

“... as a good night’s sleep. Ekirch’s first chapter is on the ‘terrors of the night’. In 1594 Thomas Nashe, the collaborator of Shakespeare, Marlowe and Jonson, published a little pamphlet, ‘speedily botched up and compiled’, as he put it, called The Terrors of the Night or A Discourse of Apparitions. It is full of digressions: ‘I have rid a false ...”

“... looking earnest or seductive. There was no dust-jacket. I did it because I had to. It’s all more complicated than that, but there you have it. I had no idea of the consequences of the decision I had made. Kleinzahler was born in 1949 and grew up in Fort Lee, New Jersey, just across from the George Washington Bridge. He went to college in Wisconsin, but ...”

“... Cecil was spotted going into the house. As he left, he was shot 16 times. He was 32. It took them more than three years to get the third Graham brother. They had tried to kill Jimmy in 1980, but he had fought them off, and been given the British Empire Medal. Perhaps his escape had annoyed them, or perhaps, as many Protestants believed, there was a deliberate ...”

“... little legally significant about it. Moore dedicates the book to her parents ‘in celebration of more than 50 years of marital harmony’, but what follows is a survivor story: what does it signify if you haven’t got a man, so long as you don’t marry a sociopath? Mary Bowes was the richest heiress in 18th-century Britain, ‘perhaps even ...”

“... as Giovan Battista Marino soon began to twist admiring conceits around this startling immediacy. More verbal wrapping has swathed Caravaggio since he returned, in the 1950s, to the art-historical spotlight after three centuries in the wings. But commentators are all on the back foot. We might argue that having trained in the north, Caravaggio learned ...”

“... from dwelling on the ideas and actions of dominant orders in states, kingdoms and empires. More crucially and rightly, she wants to move away from Michel Foucault’s influential focus on fixed prisons and penitentiaries as sites of punishment that also reveal structures and theories of power. The prisoners she studies are those millions who were ...”

“... and, to the astonishment of those present, began to undress himself’.The tablet was one of more than thirty thousand that formed the Royal Library at Nineveh of Ashurbanipal (669-631 BCE), the last great king of the Assyrian Empire: a library containing epic poems, legislative documents, financial records, hymns to gods, reports from spies, medical ...”

“... out of its mouth. She thinks it’s ‘fairly conventional’, but it strikes her nonetheless: ‘More than that: it unsettled me.’ She then moves from Géricault’s animal paintings to the 1881 treaty between Argentina and Chile to the story of a university friend whose sister married a Belgian millionaire. While walking through the mud along the ...”

“... when severed, it is proposed to pass off as Claudio’s, as ‘a man that apprehends death no more dreadfully but as a drunken sleep – careless, reckless, and fearless of what’s past, present, or to come: insensible of mortality, and desperately mortal’. David Smith finds most of this description eminently applicable to H.G. Wells (whom he intensely ...”

“... slipped into their own tone. Some of Larkin’s most haunting lines have ghostly originals here. More remarkable are the ear and the eye with which Amis has picked out and recalled the rare masterpieces among poets like Newbolt, Masefield, Squire, who wrote mostly workmanlike junk. Did it seem junk when they wrote it, to themselves and their readers? Hard to ...”

“... The multi-volume Collected Letters is more of a literary monument than a necessary scholarly resource. The club of 20th-century novelists thus honoured is as exclusive as the strictest Leavisite (if any remain) or St James blackballer could wish: D.H. Lawrence (seven vols), Virginia Woolf (six vols), Thomas Hardy (seven vols) and Katherine Mansfield (four vols ...”

“... one of his last columns, published in March 1966, O’Brien looked back on his catechism, compiled more than twenty years earlier, and described it as ‘an exegetic survey of the English language in its extremity of logo-daedalate poliomyelitis, anaemic prostration and the paralysis of incoherence’. One month after writing that, he was dead, and yet within ...”