“... determine exactly what or how much was added to the original version or where any such additions may have been put in. Parker has convinced himself that the sure mark of any added material is that some direct reference is made in it to Pierre as a working poet or novelist. And since, again in his view, all references of this kind only begin to occur about ...”

“... as it was on 24 March by Nato, than it recovers its threadbare dignity. Its status in the abstract may even have been enhanced – in some quarters anyhow – by the fact that it was weakened in a single, real instance. But in the former Yugoslavia, a loss of any kind often insinuates itself into the annals of gain, while short-term winners – Kosovo ...”

“... He was born here, he should know; we were born In the wildest desert so generous, where a man may breathe indeed. He said bright Denmark was out of the question: Only dark Africa calls, where he may make himself A paradise away from this, his woven, wet hell. III 24 September 1874 O Hans Andersen, You will have seen ...”

“... is ten thousand feet above sea level: there was snow on the ground when I crossed it on foot in May 1982, on a trek in the Himalayas with a friend. The route took us down the side of a mountain to the resthouse we were aiming for, a single-roomed stone building, maintained by an absent housekeeper. Apart from four bare bedsteads, there was nothing inside ...”

“... at the moment is Beckett’s sanitisation of old age about which, knowing so little of Beckett, I may be hopelessly wrong. But Beckett’s old age is dry, musty, desiccated. Do Beckett’s characters even smell their fingers? Who pisses? How does the woman in Happy Days shit?21 February. When we went to see the Late Rembrandt show the other week I noticed ...”

“... at 40, Baudelaire at 46. If Baudelaire has never quite attained the hipster cachet of Rimbaud, it may be purely a matter of image. (Which is itself already quite modern.) Before Keith Richards, before punk, here is rock and roll animal Arthur Rimbaud with his anti-gravity shock of lightning strike hair. A queer Pan with italicised attitude, Rimbaud gets the ...”

“... heroically honest thing to do is in a socially ‘edited’ world. On that terrible adjective we may pause for a long time. It throws the clearest and coldest beam of its presiding author’s mind, and perhaps her final capital judgment on those cool conventions, those prophylactic artifices, with which, with the best of intentions, every organised society ...”

“... unintended outcome of a Supreme Court ruling exercising jurisdiction over Guantánamo detainees may be that, in the future, capture of terrorism suspects will be foregone in favour of killing them.’ All that advocates of legal rights were going to achieve was the death of suspected terrorists, not their fair treatment. But has Obama’s switch from a ...”

“... the underground enemies are translated as ‘INKlings’.) In other stories the underground may be moved up to the 16th floor of a supermodern hotel: just once in a while, when you get out at that floor in the middle of the night, you will find yourself in total darkness, there will be a smell of mould, and somewhere down there, at the end of the ...”

“... the crisis-era emergency funding; from the point of view of international economic governance that may prove to be the most clear-cut test yet of the stance of the Trump presidency. A stark illustration of the asymmetrical structure of American world order came in recent months in the use of the dollar-based system of invoicing for international trade to ...”

“... of people claiming to be in love after decades of marriage resemble those of new lovers. Romance may authentically survive: ‘That’s what the brain scans are telling us. People can’t fake that.’ ‘Brain-Scan Lie Detectors Coming in Near Future,’ runs a news story, cued by a San Diego company press release. Will they become part of legal routine, or ...”

“... published work seems to me somewhat like deserting one’s colours,’ he told Lord Lytton. ‘One may or may not repent having enlisted, but to lay down one’s arms, except under compulsion, remains intolerable.’ Politically, Swinburne saw himself as an apostle of liberalism, supporting ...”

“... adaptation of Little Women, in which Jo March rejects romance to become the writer Louisa May Alcott. But Batuman is just teasing us. That isn’t the story here. Selin’s confidence in being able to author herself is worryingly akin to her fellow students’ boundless, all-American faith in their own perfectibility. It’s what a Harvard education ...”

“... it was, as Barrett put it, ‘an ingenious invention! – a book too small to be read!’ And she may well have felt something of a professional challenge in the struggle to submit to the constraints both of the miniature form and of another’s style. But for one who believed so intensely in poetic individuality, even thus compassionately to connive at ...”

“... of the Senses: that the sexual culture of the mid and late 19th century in the West, while it may not have been what we supposed, was nevertheless distinctive. It seems right to call this view the assumption on which Education of the Senses is based, if only because of the book’s design. It runs from ‘Victoria to Freud’, and is intended as the first ...”