“... frank versions of a gay overworld (‘Yet when I’ve had you once or twice/I may not want you any more’) would have made him a guru here; I presumed that his recent elegies on the deaths of friends from Aids would have made him a central figure in the literary life of San Francisco. But much of his poetry has also been laden down with paradox and wit; it is ...”

“... Anglo-Saxon and Emrys Jones for Shakespeare. I’m sure he spent many hours in the Bodleian, but more on the rugby pitch. In Singing School he doesn’t mention his literary prizes, but he gives the scores of the rugby matches in which he played and quotes favourable reviews of his performances from newspapers of the day. Stallworthy has always been ...”

“... Leonie Kramer.’ A footnote tells us Professor Kramer is an ‘Australian academic’ – no more. Why she has been singled out for this swipe is unexplained. The reason, I suppose, is that Professor Kramer wrote an unsympathetic piece about Riders in the Chariot in Quadrant in 1973. It was a very schematised and somewhat tedious exercise – but so is ...”

“... Latin American novelists. How to compete with history? How to create characters richer, crazier, more imaginative? Vargas and I sought an answer by inviting a dozen Latin American authors to write a novella each – no more than fifty pages per capita – on their favourite national tyrant. The collective volume would be ...”

“... all its superlatives ... Under the waterfall he surprised me bathing and gave me what I could no more refuse than the earth can refuse the rain.’ Is the wife having a bad time too? Yes. ‘On her mangledness I am spreading my amorous sheets, but who will have any pride in the wedding red, seeping up between the thighs of love which rise like a ...”

“... Compared with his closest American contemporaries, John Singer Sargent (also working in England), Thomas Eakins (determinedly homebound) and Mary Cassatt (moving between France and America), Whistler seems lightweight. He possessed neither Sargent’s bravura as a portraitist at the centre of the Anglo-American beau monde nor Eakins’s moral passion at the ...”

“... performance and a private archive, can also be found outside art galleries, rendering them even more difficult to decipher in aesthetic terms. They can nonetheless be taken to indicate a distinctive turn in recent art. In play in the first two examples – works by Felix Gonzalez-Torres and by Rirkrit Tiravanija – is a notion of art as an ephemeral ...”

“... heroine and her father would travel all over Europe – ‘Plan of a Novel’ would require rather more space than the ‘little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory’ that Austen told her nephew was enough for one of her novels – meeting ‘a wide variety of Characters’ that hardly resembled real people: ‘All the Good will be unexceptionable in every ...”

“... In around 799 he was lauded by an anonymous poet as pater Europae, the father of Europe. In more recent times too, the name of Charlemagne has been used to evoke an idea of European integration. Immediately after the Second World War, when historians looked back at Charlemagne across the wreckage of the Carolingian heartlands, they saw the costs of his ...”

“... of her ‘two talents … two things that give me a reason to go on living … is required any more’. The two things are ‘writing music and bringing up children’. This is a little melodramatic, but she knows this. At one point she imagines it may be her ‘destiny … to be always alone’, yet she also sees this as a ‘tragic, self-dramatising ...”

“... time these impressions change. In the campus bookshop he finds editions of Duns Scotus and Saint Thomas Aquinas (who, he says, have never been translated into French); in the library there are yards of shelving devoted to French literature. He likens America to 19th-century Britain in being at the same time innovatory and conservative. His Paris ...”

“... of, and thought of herself, as a grande dame – inher case, of children’s literature, or, more specifically, of stories about ‘animals who behave like humans, and even mix with them on equal terms’. She hadn’t Beatrix Potter’s insight in these matters. In Beatrix Potter’s books there is a moment when, without explanation, the rabbit loses ...”

“... horses; but the car is a time-machine on which one can slide from one century to another at no more trouble than the pushing forward of a lever.’ The smoothness and audacity of the narrative transitions between ancient and modern in Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) and Rewards and Fairies (1910) may owe something to the stinking Lanchester: or, rather, to ...”

“... alone NHS dentists) are harder to come by. In June this year, 102,000 people waited more than twelve hours to be seen in A&E, and another 441,000 waited for between four and twelve hours. Social care budgets, which have remained below 2010 levels over the last decade, leave patients who should be discharged stranded in hospital – accounting ...”

“... count on a murderer for a fancy prose style,’ as Humbert Humbert says in Lolita); Tabor is a more restricting instrument. Motion warns us that Tabor was a sometime imitator of Wordsworth with a poetic tone as ‘dry as biscuit’. And at moments he plausibly resembles a genuine Wordsworthian bore (the narrator of ‘The Thorn’, for example): ‘a ...”