“... and music, her bold denunciations of bishops and emperors, her celebrity as a preacher – may be nonplussed by a first exposure to her writings. For Hildegard was at once prodigiously learned and, as she somewhat disingenuously claimed, ‘a poor, uneducated little female’. The point of this claim was to underline the prophetic authority on which ...”

“... things. If this is so, Ackroyd underrates how sheerly unusual was Eliot’s course of life. Eliot may speak of his pusillanimity, but it may be pusillanimously self-gratifying of us to concur. Yet at the same time Ackroyd does the opposite: he finds Eliot more unusual, in my judgment, than is warranted by Ackroyd’s own ...”

“... when she was a child after such a tea; and she and Yeats were born in the same year, 1865. Empson may have given up writing poems forty or so years ago, but such prose is at least as well written as good poetry. And so is the touching vision of how it may have been that Andrew Marvell succumbed to the ague or the ...”

“... There may not be any royal road to the understanding of an alien or half-alien culture – contemporary Japan, or the Medieval West – but one path which appears to lead into the interior is the study of that culture’s heroes. If we can only discover why, say, kamikaze pilots or Medieval saints have been singled out for honour, so the argument goes, the basic values of the culture which admires them will be revealed ...”

“... the conclusion of the essay on Williams, he expresses himself as ‘horribly afraid’ that he may have given the impression that Wiliams was a moralist, and in several places he shows himself as anxious to obviate a related misconception about himself. In writing fiction he has never started off with any didactic intention, and much less any eristic ...”

“... In the London Review of Books, John Maynard Smith said about scientists: ‘however interested they may be in politics or history or philosophy, their first love is science itself.’ If only I could follow this bent, and tell something of Hamilton as a mathematician. As it happens, he also wrote a good deal of poetry, but his poems lack the magic of his equations, which seem more beautiful and moving now than when they were imagined 150 years ago ...”

“... way of life which, even as described in his own anthology, seems relatively unappealing. Whatever may be said in favour of the country house as a mode of government, way of life, shrine of culture or architectural artifact, there is clearly much to be said against it too, in part because so many country-house owners seem to have been so peculiarly insensitive ...”

“... long been his most absorbing interest. The essay on historical inevitability from the early 1950s may be seen as the turning-point. Here Vico makes a brief appearance for the first time, and since then his writings have all belonged to his new field: they are gathered together in the volumes Against the Current, Russian Thinkers and Vico and Herder. The ...”

“... Sherston to himself. He now accepts that it is not necessary to approve of tactics which he may simply not understand, and after a brief spell in the pavilion – ‘retired hurt’ – he plays on until the match is over, wicket intact. For all the possible irony of its title, Sherston’s Progress finally endorses Pilgrim’s journey towards the ...”

“... enshrined in the mausoleum outside Tehran which has just been destroyed. Mohammed Reza Shah, too, may find himself embalmed in Egypt: but he will certainly have to wait for enshrinement in his native Iran. The former monarch’s main preoccupation now is to mull over how it all went wrong, as though the scattered pieces of the jigsaw puzzle could somehow be ...”

“... thing who had had a wild youth, a sheep in wolf’s clothing. This reappraisal, however grotesque, may in part have been motivated by a sudden desire to be analytical and reasonably truthful, after all the intoxicating polemics: but in part, too, it would have involved the prudent, politic fear that if Foot is now leader of the Labour Party he might well be ...”

“... and the finish. So much so, indeed, that when discussing the behaviour of atoms and electrons we may doubt whether these entities are more than convenient fictions introduced as part of the paraphernalia of the mathematical theory. But there is worse to come: it is easy to devise experiments involving two or more observers, and to find that their combined ...”

“... A city without a past is a city without a future. It may exist as a set of buildings, but not as a culture. But not every city with a past has a future, except as a set of buildings. The springs of innovation may dry up, the crossroads that first gave it its importance may no longer lead anywhere ...”

“... have news from the animals and how it’s meant to affect us. To put it another way, sociobiology may now take on a modish garb: homosexual lizards are suddenly ‘discovered’ in the South-Western United States; some females in nature turn out to be, rather briefly, nice to each other. Do we care? This is of course unfair, since both writers might argue ...”

“... about them. A cross-section of the bole of a Richardson willow no thicker than your finger may reveal 200 annual growth rings beneath the magnifying-glass. Much of the tundra, of course, appears to be treeless when, in many places, it is actually covered with trees – a thick matting of short, ancient willows and birches. You realise suddenly that you ...”