“... at some point he slipped from seeming younger to seeming older than everyone around him. He was a self-taught modernist with an allegiance to medieval romance and Celtic art, a Londoner who was out of place in London, a Welshman who didn’t speak Welsh. He was an artist who constructed images out of words – in his painted inscriptions – and whose poems ...”

“... at the hospital that morning looking even after weeks of illness not much different from her usual self; weeping and distraught, it’s true, but still plump and pretty, clutching her everlasting handbag and still somehow managing to face the world. As I followed my father down the ward I wondered why we were bothering: there was no such person here. He ...”

“... Rap Guide to Evolution, featuring the ‘African-American Atheist Rapper Greydon Square’, the ‘self-styled “Walking Stephen Hawking”’. In Manhattan, the Ensemble Theater produced Darwin’s Challenge (‘On his trip aboard the HMS Beagle, Charles Darwin wanders into a cave on Galapagos and finds himself on the set of a 21st-century reality TV show ...”

“... fighting to the last bullet to defend Hitler in his bunker, could emerge as best choice for the Robert Schuman Prize for services to European unity.* Why should European justice too not let bygones be bygones? More generally, appointments to the court had little or nothing to do with juridical qualifications. Nearly all were political. The Belgian judge was ...”

“... nowadays I’m not sure that ‘the pictures’, like ‘the wireless’, aren’t among the self-consciously adopted emblems of fogeydom, the verbal equivalent of those smart Covent Garden establishments that do a line in old luggage. But calling the pictures ‘the movies’ went with calling cigarettes ‘fags’, beer ‘booze’ or girls ...”

“... Merchants and Revolution, dedicated to Stone, comprehensively overturns that judgment. Its author, Robert Brenner, belongs to that rare group of historians who have given their name to a whole literature – the ‘Brenner Debate’ on the origins of agrarian capitalism in Europe recalling the ‘Pirenne Thesis’ of old. His new book, in which the name of ...”

“... the uncertain Irishness of certain writers. Was Sterne Irish? Was Oliver Goldsmith Irish? Was Robert Tressell Irish? Is Iris Murdoch Irish? But the argument about who was gay and who was not and how we know is more difficult. How can someone be gay if, as in the case of Gogol, there is no direct evidence? Yet if you trawl through Gogol’s stories with ...”

“... her Catriona; would that be all right by me? I was very happy about it. We were both admirers of Robert Louis Stevenson. Kidnapped was really our favourite, but we couldn’t call our daughter David, or name her after Alan Breck. She’d have to be named for the sequel.Like all my contemporaries, in those first years when the contraceptive pill was widely ...”

“... stopped-up bowels, Jewish angst and mother-woe, revived and inflamed accusations that Roth was a self-hating Jew, an enemy of his own people peddling filth. ‘Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew! It is coming out of my ears already, the saga of the suffering Jews! Do me a favour, my people, and stick your suffering heritage up your suffering ass – I happen also to be ...”

“... reappropriated. But the circumstances were now different. The Jewish cultural presence evinced a self-confidence, an institutional weight and a recognised legitimacy that permitted both the Jewish and the universal importance of the genocidal experience to be more aggressively affirmed. This was assisted by a recession of anti-semitism in the West, driven ...”

“... they are ideas, so to speak, without ties to anything material, which might serve as a deterrent. Self-persuaded, they need no persuasion. As incarnate ideas, they have lost the power of thought, which may seem paradoxical till you reflect on it. These ordinary men, including fathers of families, have turned into syllogisms, and a syllogism cannot think but ...”

“... sculpted my life like a statue made of matter that’s foreign to my being. Having employed my self-awareness in such a purely artistic way, and having become so completely external to myself, I sometimes no longer recognise myself. Who am I behind this unreality? I don’t know. I must be someone.’In 1907, aged nineteen, Pessoa wrote some brief ...”

“... to our historical existence.’ This want, of course, if fully indulged, would lead poetry into self-deception – hence the countervailing presence of Prospero, whose covenant is with ‘truth’ rather than ‘beauty’ – ‘and a poet cannot bring us any truth without introducing into his poetry the problematic, the painful, the disorderly, the ...”

“... scientist, intrigued by the general’s stake in his own myth-making as a means of empowerment and self-justification. In his new biography, Jonathan Fenby delivers the infant Charles into an era of anxiety, brought on by the growing strength of Germany and the sense that France had lost its way. The year was 1890; the smart of the Franco-Prussian War was ...”

“... and how the failings of Italy’s transport infrastructure encouraged the creation of more self-sufficient steel mini-mills. Britain’s relative decline has been the subject of hundreds if not thousands of books. Perhaps it should be no surprise that the analysis here is often both familiar and at first glance deeply depressing. The examples cited of ...”