“... a gentlemanly job, and began his sea career immediately after leaving Hawkshead Grammar School. It may have been a peculiarity of the Wordsworth family that whereas the other sons sought employment and preferment in the ordinary way, it was assumed that the poet was owed a living from the outset. In The Prelude Wordsworth celebrates the freedom conferred by a ...”

“... is going to get us into all kinds of trouble, psychic and material. But partial, affective denial may be a loyalty to whatever the facts destroyed or replaced. Why should we let go mentally, in our stories, so to speak, of what we have already lost in every other sense? To refuse, at least initially, to accept the death of a person we love ...”

“... of food vouchers worth £35 a week. ‘Many asylum seekers come from communities where wealth may be stored in jewellery,’ explains the Home Office minister Mike O’Brien, ‘and it is right for us to take account of that wealth.’ ‘Is the minister suggesting,’ asks Diane Abbott MP, ‘that asylum seekers should sell their jewellery, perhaps their ...”

“... resumes his research with the hard-won and incompletely convincing insight that biography itself may be a kind of snuff movie. What is this novel saying about biographers and biographies? When the first thirty or so pages of The Biographer’s Tale were first published (in New Writing 8, 1999), the extract was called ‘Brief Lives’. So a good starting ...”

“... codex. As early as 125, what later became Biblical text already took the form of a book. The book may give way to the screen some time soon but it has been with us now for two thousand years – and de Hamel’s main argument is that it is essentially the product of our Biblical culture. So, the jagged triangle in the Rylands is the closest we can get to our ...”

“... because you can never tell, and both the Arab unity and the Muslim-Jewish co-operation he sought may always have been chimerical. That said, Anderson concludes, ‘it’s hard to imagine that any of this could possibly have produced a sadder history than what has actually transpired over the past century, a catalogue of war, religious strife and brutal ...”

“... of the Cold War it is time to start again. None of the old assumptions applies any longer. Russia may be difficult to deal with but it is not an enemy: we have relatively normal relations with it. The US now has strategic nuclear primacy over Russia: its chances of disabling Russian nuclear forces with a first strike are estimated at more than 90 per ...”

“... guilt, the court held that the pig be ‘strangled on a gibbet of wood’ so that ‘an example may be made and justice maintained’. Pigs were not the only culprits. The medieval courts of Europe, particularly those of France, appear to have dealt with a ‘miscellaneous crew’ of beasts, including ...”

“... or modern, who doesn’t abide by his own teachings. A mathematician who solves a famous problem may be a known scoundrel and liar, but mathematicians don’t come up with ethical injunctions for others to follow. If we were to discover that despite his exaltation of the rational part of the soul, Plato spent his days getting drunk and ogling young boys in ...”

“... save it. ‘When at a high level of state responsibility,’ he said in a televised interview in May, ‘you allow yourself to look a citizen in the eyes and lie to him, when you allow yourself to rig elections, to buy elections … is that what you call democracy?’ Whether Sanogo intended to save Mali’s democracy or confiscate it is an open ...”

“... off the stage, British politics (or perhaps one should say English politics, since Scotland may be going its separate, but equally parochial way) will be in the hands of a generation of late thirty and early fortysomethings, almost all of whom went to the same university at roughly the same time and studied the same subject. As well as the two ...”

“... a ceasefire and unnerving those who have come to realise that the relative calm they are enjoying may hang on the word of someone they fear and despise – and have often underestimated. These events came too late for inclusion in Patrick Cockburn’s book, but they follow the pattern he skilfully sets out in this complex account of the emergence of Muqtada ...”

“... but there are clear signs that its leaders are worried about climbing on the Taliban tiger. They may be rigidly puritanical in their ideology, but they are the kind of rigid puritans who in British and American politics have often proved remarkably flexible when it comes down to accepting government jobs and forming alliances. Munawar Hassan, the Jamaat’s ...”

“... with folk or even fairy tale in ways that are not easy to sort out. Peele’s questing knight may primarily evoke the world of romance, but that is not his only habitat. Jack, and the maidens at the well, certainly suggest folk tale but without being confined to it. Delia, Venelia, the were-bear and the magician Sacrapant who persecutes them could be ...”

“... Heidegger to D.H. Lawrence continued to look on science as the death of the spirit. F.R. Leavis may have inveighed against what he called the ‘technologico-Bethamite spirit’, but his Cambridge colleague I.A. Richards drew on psychology and neurology for his theory of poetry. Poetry became a kind of mental hygiene or spiritual therapy, in contrast to the ...”