“... by water and a departure by water frame the plots of The Flying Dutchman and Lohengrin. The Ring saga begins literally in the water, below the river Rhine’s surface (to end, four operas later, with a cosmic duet of water and fire). Wagner’s most delirious exploration of fluidity, Tristan and Isolde, begins and ends with journeys over water. Act One ...”

“... and Dooey, is known as the Scratchings and is the site of a vanished settlement of the early Christian era. As a child in the Fifties I’d go out with friends and find horses’ teeth, packed oyster, mussel and clam shells, then sometimes bronze and iron pins, bits of ancient Celtic jewellery. One hot afternoon I uncovered a charred piece of wood with ...”

“... he calls them ‘innovative’, or advocates of ‘political experimentation’, but the phrases ring anachronistically when applied to a period when proponents of change congratulated themselves on looking backward. Norbrook himself shows that his radical tradition, at least after the mid-16th century, was not dedicated to social amelioration or ...”

“... response to the conflict. Roland and Vera had become unofficially engaged (Vera refused to wear a ring) while he was on leave in August that year: they had both evidently decided that this was to be the next step in their relationship and went ahead despite the fact that their meetings were distinguished by an inability to recapture the intimacy of their ...”

“... these pages included the 1866 Poems and Ballads, whose necrophiliac, sadomasochistic and anti-Christian sentiments provoked such outrage in the press that his publisher was frightened into withdrawing the book, this was a defiant statement. But Swinburne liked defiance. He had ignored the pleas of his friends to moderate the poems before they were ...”

“... College, Oxford had instilled a churchy disdain for low commercialism. Though he quickly tired of Christian ‘mumbo-jumbo’, he was a lifelong lover of churches. Hanson includes a letter from an early trip to northern France, which shows him already coming to understand Gothic cathedrals not as built expressions of doctrine but as outcrops of a landscape ...”

“... the gold coinage of the European humanistic tradition; the magnificent florins of humanism will ring once again, not against the archaeologist’s spade, but ... like the jingling coins of common currency passing from hand to hand. It may only be a chance of translation that the coin of Mandelstam’s hope is the Florentine one, the currency of Dante’s ...”

“... of the fatedness to irony, but then, as Cavell says, ‘Wittgenstein’s audience is not the Christian inoculated against Christianity.’ Cavell writes not primarily to produce new theses or conclusions, nor to produce new arguments to old conclusions, but, as Kierkegaard and the later Wittgenstein did, to excavate and transform the reader’s ...”

“... invented – the Four O’Clock in the Morning Club, whose insomniac members were entitled to ring each other up at that lonely hour. These healing conversations might largely consist of warnings about an imminent New Moon, for they shared a fanatic belief in the danger of glimpsing such a phenomenon through intervening glass. (Spectacles, and on occasion ...”

“... but just as the Sufis challenged Sharia Islam, Vaishnavites the Vedic ritualists, or Christian mystics the authority of the pope, this move threatens the guardians and interpreters of scripture. In Ge’s account, Zhu Xi is a cantankerous, embattled figure, far from the plaster saint he later became, vigorously defending engagement with the world ...”

“... Mr Lagnari knew that he was dying. His wife and son opened the door before I had a chance to ring the bell. They made way for me in the tiny vestibule, their faces pinched with worry. ‘He’s more settled now,’ the son whispered, anxious that his father might overhear, ‘but he thinks his number’s up.’ I nodded: his impressions might be more ...”

“... of the playing fields at Kingswood, Frank and his comrades imbibed the lessons of pagan epic and Christian piety to synthesise their Communism. The two brothers reached similar conclusions about the efforts that the privileged few would be called on to make in the name of the proletariat. What could be more chivalrous or public spirited? Yet Frank was keener ...”

“... regularly depicted him striding into battle, walking a tightrope or slugging it out in the boxing ring. The image was one of perpetual motion, yet he could not move unaided: FDR was the wheelchair president. It’s important to spell out what his disability entailed. Roosevelt was stricken by polio in 1921 and never recovered the use of his legs. Every day he ...”

“... eating ice cream; a body bearing the scrawled sign ‘This nigger tried to vote’; or the wedding ring worn by a black woman who hangs from a tree in front of a great crowd while horses graze in the background. In a 1909 article called ‘Lynching, Our National Crime’, Ida B. Wells identified another, unassimilable strangeness: ‘No other nation, civilised ...”

“... Afterwards, and for no obvious reason, he began calling friends on his mobile phone. ‘I’d just ring and say, “Hi, how are you?” – that kind of thing,’ he told me. ‘It wasn’t that I had much to say. I don’t know why, but I was starting to feel very lonely.’ His wife had already left the house when he woke the next morning. Ono had no ...”