“... I thought sadder than anything in Joni Mitchell or Leonard Cohen. I was also interested in Thomas Kinsella’s ‘Another September’, because I knew the house just outside Enniscorthy where it was set and I had met the poet’s wife, whose sleeping figure was evoked in the poem. What was most interesting about it, though, was the way it left the ...”

“... to a summary halt by the heavy-handed intervention of the Inkatha feudal boss of nearby Lindelani, Thomas Shabalala. Shabalala is a classic figure of squatter life – the shacklord who takes rent or tribute from his subjects, providing them in return with law and order enforced by his own impi of strong-arm men. Thanks to Shabalala, Lindelani is a peaceful ...”

“... guarantees generously, with full regard to international standards of human rights. Sir Thomas Bingham’s Court of Appeal has insisted that the more substantial the interference with human rights, the more the courts will require by way of justification of the ‘reasonableness’ of the decision. The outdated technical rules that prevented ...”

“... argued in an autumnal and even conciliatory reflection on Wagner published several years after his savage book on the composer, ‘Wagner is the first case of uncompromising musical nominalism ... the first in which the primacy of the individual work of art, and within the work the primacy of figure, in its concrete elaborated reality, is established ...”

“... of Nijinsky’s startling performance at the hotel he began to write a diary – a series of savage declarations, the mirror (or the blackboard) of a creative mind on the slide, incorporating letters to people he loved or loathed. As the diary ends he is on his way to see Eugen Bleuler – the man who came up with the word ‘schizophrenic’ – and not ...”

“... in their immediate, literal forms that an education is being identified. Similarly Joyce’s savage parody in Ulysses of the Apostles’ Creed as it might unofficially sound for the English requires us only to remember the echo of what it’s not: They believe in rod, the scourger almighty, creator of hell upon earth and in Jacky Tar, the son of a ...”

“... there was relatively little violence against the person – though the Boys were capable of savage beatings and dreadful acts of mutilation and torture – but there was plenty of intimidating behaviour and violence against property. New fences were torn down, ditches filled, walls levelled and the landscape sprinkled with mock gallows and open ...”

“... representative of the Age of Reason. In particular, he hoped to challenge the condescension of Thomas Carlyle, who dismissed Hume as an associate of Voltaire and the French philosophes, and a slave to the ‘obscurations of sense, which eclipse this truth within us’. Hume had imagined, according to Carlyle, that the mechanistic logic with which he ...”

“... a lot of associations, many of them unpleasant: ‘worthless’, ‘denounce’, ‘infarct’, ‘savage’ on the first page; ‘sickness’, ‘stultified’, ‘damnable’, ‘punitive’, ‘infringed’, ‘infertile’, ‘daunted’, ‘distress’, ‘terror’ by the sixth. Not to mention disturbing phrases: ‘fissures nailed front and back; hair ...”

“... which, to borrow Boswell’s verdict on the aristocratic pretensions of Johnson’s friend Richard Savage, ‘the world must vibrate in a state of uncertainty’). But what of the ‘perpetual confinement’ as Johnson’s caretaker, which she described in her first published book, Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson? In her arranged literary marriage to the ...”

“... various kinds including the gifted amateur Sir George Beaumont, Francis Chantry, John Constable, Thomas Lawrence, James Northcote and John Soane; and from the theatre, Jack Bannister, George Colman the younger, various Kembles, the long-deified Mrs Siddons and very many more. There were peers of the realm, baronets, famous churchmen, a duchess. One hundred ...”

“... In his essay on the painter Jack Yeats, which he sent to Beckett in 1938, Thomas McGreevy wrote: ‘During the 20-odd years preceding 1916, Jack Yeats filled a need that had become immediate in Ireland for the first time in 300 years, the need of the people to feel that their own life was being expressed in art.’* Beckett was in Paris when he read the essay ...”

“... What a pleasure​ to return to Thomas Hardy. For about a hundred pages. Then the torment begins, and we’re not even halfway through. From now on each turn of the page will expose the reader to greater unhappiness. There’s a moment in The Return of the Native where the main character, Clym, already deeply troubled by his mother’s mysterious death, goes out of his way to find a little boy who may be able to tell him exactly what happened ...”

“... death in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, Frederick Martin, a former amanuensis of Thomas Carlyle, published the first biography of the ‘peasant poet’. It laid the foundations, Jonathan Bate says in his new Life, ‘for both the enduring myths and some of the key truths about Clare’. Though there have been other biographies since ...”

“... on the benighted denizens of an earlier age. This comforting collective mythology came under savage attack a generation ago, when Michel Foucault launched his sustained assault on the Enlightenment and its values by writing a revisionist history of madness and (Western) civilisation: a history that turned the Whigs on their heads and denounced ‘that ...”