“... poets especially have been very keen on remembering what they haven’t done. I’m thinking of Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’ and the unrealised walk in the first part of T.S. Eliot’s first Quartet.Frost says ‘Two roads diverged in a yellow wood’, and recounts his regret that he ‘could not travel both/And be one traveller’. He looked ...”

“... Opponents of this analysis – notably Matthew Goodwin, whose Revolt on the Right (written with Robert Ford) first identified Ukip voters as older and poorer than the general population – argue that the Leave/Remain faultline is essentially a cultural one. Among working-class voters identified as former or potential Labour supporters, the divisive issue ...”

“... lash to and fro like a dog shaking a rat. Compare this work of nature with Spiral Jetty, which Robert Smithson built out into Great Salt Lake in Utah thirty years ago. It’s more neatly coiled than the spit at Rudha Cailleach. Both change continually, the one in its shape, the other in its invisibility; indeed Salt Lake rose recently and drowned the ...”

“... obfuscating misbeliefs which can only be shown up and corrected by a knowledge of the past. This self-deception about the history of the family has particularly affected Western Europeans. Frenchmen, Germans or Englishmen, unless they have come across the work of recent historical sociologists, are likely to believe the following. That the co-resident ...”

“... the Survey of London began life as one of those ventures in historical preservation and national self-regard which burgeoned in the 1890s and 1900s, and included the National Trust, Country Life, the Burlington Magazine, the Victoria County History, the Dictionary of National Biography and the Historical Monuments Commission. All were concerned with ...”

“... Gunn to the National Library of Scotland in 1971. But the letters seem unencumbered by writerly self-consciousness. Gunn and Shepherd didn’t meet often – Andrews notes that ‘their friendship exists mostly in their letters’ – but over more than forty years they developed a rare kind of ease. Shepherd addresses him as ‘Neil me lad’. He tells her ...”

“... before the king like a ‘piece of sexual bait’, and James bit. The current favourite, Sir Robert Carr, a flaxen-haired Scot, prevented Buckingham from being immediately parachuted into intimacy as a gentleman of the bedchamber. Instead, Buckingham became one of James’s cupbearers. He stood at James’s elbow, kept his glass topped up with wine and ...”

“... goal my whole life: to become an Icelandic writer.’The reader is made aware of opinionatedness, self-confidence, indomitability, mercuriality, application, aggression. Qualities not attractive in themselves, and often put to the service of poorer ends. Guðmundsson frequently mentions Laxness’s charm. He asked a lot of his mother, his wives and his ...”

“... not discern [them] from Inglish men’. Exile, voluntary or otherwise, provided opportunities for self-reinvention. Leonard Ragapo, who came to England with Raleigh, became a society celebrity and generous host, ‘not after the ordinarie rude manner of the Indians’, according to the adventurer Robert Harcourt, ‘but in ...”

“... Confederate soldiers in the American South. In this wave of iconoclasm, Cecil Rhodes, Silent Sam, Robert E. Lee and Edward Colston were practically surrogates for each other in a transnational story of empire, colonialism and slavery – a story that demanded retelling with renewed attention to its victims. Like some businesses, churches and government ...”

“... It was for these kinds of text that the next generation of printers remembered him. In 1510, Robert Copland noted that he was ‘gladly folowynge the trace of my mayster Caxton/begynnyng wyth small storyes and pamfletes’.The incunabula (‘swaddling-clothes’) period of printing, which refers to works printed before 1501, saw much interchange between ...”

“... which encompasses, among other things, the American Civil War, Wuthering Heights, Richard III and Robert Browning’s ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’.Singularities was written on the heels of My Emily Dickinson. I picked it up soon after it was published, accustomed by then to what was broadly, and belligerently, in the air at the ...”

“... an argument, a question. At times he seems to argue that the Japanese have no conception of self, on the evidence of the shosetsu (for which ‘novel’ is the inevitable but not wholly accurate translation). Like other fresh studies, Accomplices of Silence has irritated the complacent and has still to receive the sincerest form of flattery. On the ...”

“... that everyone, even the békés, actually spoke was included, it took the form of a condescending, self-alienating phonetics – the quaint mumbo-jumbo of the p’tit nègre. The novelists Maryse Cond and Simone Schwarz-Bart still write in standard French and look primarily to their African origins; their work is only faintly inflected by the postwar trend for ...”

“... a bay), William Baffin (who became an island) and Vitus Bering (who became a strait). He describes Robert Peary claiming the North Pole for America, and how, to keep up the morale of his men, Richard Collinson erected a billiard table on the sea-ice of Cambridge Bay. The table was fashioned from snow blocks, the cushions from walrus skin stuffed with ...”