“... sonnet forms in English, and this is one of them, the Shakespearean. The other, the Petrarchan, is more coherent aesthetically, having only two rhymes in the octave (the first eight lines) and two more in the sestet (the last six), but it is much harder to write in English than in Italian, because English has fewer ...”

“... brother, Jonathan, was a grandmaster and ten times British chess champion. But there was much more to Roger’s puzzling than this. People who know little else about what he did may be familiar with the Penrose triangle, which shares space with Escher’s prints on the walls of student bedrooms around the world, or with Penrose tiling – tessellated ...”

“... For more than two thousand years, classical culture – as a set of institutions and as a way of life – has been lamenting its own imminent extinction. By inventing the idea of ‘barbarity’ to be the antitype of their own ‘civilised’ values, the ancient Greeks prompted the fear that those barbarians (real or, for the most part, imaginary) would sooner or later triumph ...”

“... sort of way: I was the most recently hired editor at the imprint, one of its more highly paid staff members, and my list, though filled with erudite, well-written books, was not the most profitable. If anyone was for the chop, it was likely to be me. And the possibility of staff cuts seemed far from remote. The share price of the ...”

“... is happening in Browning studies, one marked by the accession of new editions – do little more than try to base an ethical conclusion on what they take to be the psychology of what they take to be the Duke’s ‘character’; and though such probings are often acute and sensible, they hardly advance understanding of the poem beyond the critical ...”

“... 17th century, a sort of Tillyardian monster with which our examiners are still wrestling. In more recent times, revisionism in the 17th century has created the opportunity to build a new coherence, but it cannot be said that this opportunity has yet been fully taken. These four books perhaps suggest that the time is coming when a synthesis will at last ...”

“... élite. In Hertfordshire, the most open of these three sample counties, new entrants never came to more than a third of the owners of big houses, and elsewhere they were almost always under a fifth. And these new names were not usually enriched by industry, but by government office, the professions, particularly law, or by finance. Only in brewing, as we ...”

“... in front of the window. There were six or seven of them. The wolves were quite white, and looked more like foxes or sheep-dogs, for they had big tails like foxes and they had their ears pricked like dogs when they pay attention to something. In great terror, evidently of being eaten up by the wolves, I screamed and woke up. This is the Wolf-Man’s ...”

“... One may be puzzled at this description and one might have wished that the good Doctor had been more precise in his definitions and delineations. Is it possible to note so exactly these different areas of London? No such doubts exist for Mr Lottman. There is an area in Paris which is called ‘the Left Bank’ and which is geographically recognisable in ...”

“... of received opinion, and another considerable public has been assured by those who like the piety more than the poetry. The stratagems of the imagist method have long ago been absorbed into ordinary reading habits; the quotations and allusions have all been identified and accepted without remark. So it is a little difficult to see what is left for criticism ...”

“... the last war, American officers in London nightclubs were also said to favour this method, and more recently, in various underdeveloped countries, we are told that the wealthy have been seen to impress the indigenous poor by this same eccentric display of contempt for the real value of money. It is doubtful whether this simple yet complicated ploy ...”

“... challenges in mind. Apart from its title sequence, his second book, Airy Hall (1989), was a much more troublesome affair, showing the pressure of a more discursive and politically complex area of his imagination, at some cost to clarity and impetus. ‘The Kitchen Bitch’, an ambitious but clotted narrative, seemed ...”

“... Swann is obsessed by what he doesn’t know about Odette. His anguish has no remedy; finding out more only adds to what he does know about her. Since Kant, lots of philosophers have suffered from a generalised and aggravated form of the same complaint. They want to know what the world is like when they aren’t thinking about it; what things are like, not ...”

“... with its numinous landscapes that ‘never existed on earth’. The imagined Palestine mattered more than the actual place. ‘I don’t want to know where it is,’ Lawrence remarked. ‘I never want to go to Palestine.’ For many, this habit of thought was constantly reinforced by the extraordinary persistence of The Pilgrim’s Progress as a template ...”

“... and Russians in unconvincing native disguises sometimes ventured into the contentious territories, more usually both sides made use of proxies. Hence the phrase ‘tournament of shadows’, a coinage of the Russian Foreign Minister, Count Nesselrode. The British used Indian pandits who had been carefully trained in the skills of surveying and espionage. The ...”