“... to express to the life what ecstasies and transports of the soul are, when it is so sav’d, as I may say, out of the very grave; and I do not wonder now at that custom, viz. That when a malefactor who has the halter about his neck, is tied up, and just going to be turn’d off, and has a reprieve brought to him: I say, I do not wonder that they bring a ...”

“... on, which enables him to match and make his vision of the world. He was 17½ when the war ended in May 1945. The compulsion exerted on him comes, not from the events of the past, but from a recollection of those events. In Grass’s early novels it is converted into a prose which turns out to be the only major source of liberation from an unmanageable literary ...”

“... to the tenets of Islam, they announced, were largely immune from the debt crisis. Devout Muslims may lend and borrow under certain conditions; they can even buy and sell debt in the form of ‘Islamic’ bonds, but most other kinds of debt trading are frowned on. Al Rajhi Bank, based in Saudi Arabia, and the Kuwait Finance House posted impressive profits in ...”

“... the Irish are pleased to call the confluence of two little streams, pompously or poetically as you may please to decide, I think more has been made of it than either the waters or their meeting deserve.’ This is the English travel writer John Barrow writing of the Vale of Avoca in 1835. Like him, I find it hard to decide on the register of the phrase, so ...”

“... that the world does not give us everything we deserve, but warning that any attempt to change it may rob us of what little we have.Mises was not a conservative, however. He was a radical liberal, as he explained at length in 1922 in Die Gemeinwirtschaft (‘The Collective Economy’, translated as Socialism). The book was intended as a refutation of Marxism ...”

“... cameras from the company that made AlphaGo, DeepMind, followed him there. On YouTube we may forever watch Lee, lean and delicate in an open-necked shirt and black suit, step out alone onto the terrace. He looks north across the city, past the Korean foreign ministry towards Bugaksan mountain. The moment would turn out to be the end of one world and ...”

“... the story, gives a sense of progressive development, of movement towards a goal. Though that sense may still start to grow in individual episodes, to run the tape backwards is to check it, to arrest the leap of the heart as it bounds up. We are given a stronger sense of inevitability, of moments which, open when they were lived, are now frozen in time: each ...”

“... spread over our cars, refrigerators and television sets. Politicians, economists and commentators may agree on little else, but few would now dispute that Britain has suffered from a long and profound failure of what Porter calls ‘sustainable competitive advantage’. Nor would many dispute that this relative decline has been the central political issue in ...”

“... what he wanted was more warmth. (The greater part of the warmth went into the writing; Goethe may have had this in mind when he made the otherwise florid and trite declaration that all his works were fragments of a great confession.) When he had at last finished the complete Faust, he wrote (24 July): ‘I think it’s about the best thing ever ...”

“... any of the great results which have been predicted, however ostensibly victorious either side may prove to be, and whatever the results may prove to be for the other. It will not solve the problems of the Middle East, or those of America, now in a deep recession, plagued by poverty, joblessness, and an urban, education ...”

“... that his great object had been to get electricity from a magnet. Visitors to Exhibition Road may also experience some incredulity, for the first caption they come to is dominated by that text from Romans 1.20 which suggests that those who fail to discern the finger of God in creation are without excuse: ‘For the invisible things of Him, from the ...”

“... much more.) On the other hand, £25 (though a distinctly modest price for a book of this size) may seem a bit steep for half of the facts. The amount of documentation available is indeed fantastic: to go no further, accounts of conversations with him, excluding Eckermann’s, run to some four thousand printed pages, by Boyle’s estimate, some twelve ...”

“... heightened by his singular learning, and given bone and muscle by his logical gifts. You may not agree with him but it is never a mystery where he stands or in what he believes. Beyond this, and what, I think, puts Wollheim in the narrow circle of this century’s creative thinkers, is that his topics are systematically interconnected. ‘His views ...”

“... and diesafely inside me.This fantasy of providing salvation overlaps with a fantasy of power. It may be a benign revenge, but it is revenge for all that. The tension between the two roles shows up in a poem like ‘His Terror’, which concludes:Maybe his terror is not of dying,or even of death, but of some cryhe has kept inside him all his lifeand there are ...”

“... Church of England within Christendom. Fisher was undoubtedly the victim of royal tyranny, but it may be unhelpful to describe Henry VIII as ‘the most contemptible human specimen ever to sit upon the throne of England’. Moreover it is questionable whether Fisher displayed that capacity for leadership – ‘clarity and confidence of vision, tenacity of ...”