“... in the army. He was sent to France in November 1917 and invalided home with a shell wound in May 1918. His undergraduate career began in earnest in January 1919. During his training, Lewis had developed a close friendship with another fresh-faced future subaltern, Paddy Moore. Lewis’s relationship with Jane Moore, Paddy’s mother, was to be arguably ...”

“... generations. He also scoured his bottom drawer for material. The longest of the lives, that of Richard Savage, was substantially a reprint of a monument to a feckless and garrulous friend that Johnson had published in 1744. Johnson’s critique of Pope’s epitaphs from 1756 was appended to his ‘Life of Pope’, even though it provides an incongruously ...”

“... awe’, occupation, settler colonialism, the idolatry of markets. Many Muslims, Atran believes, may experience these things, but very few take up arms or sacrifice their own lives in the name of the struggle. What is it that propels them? Equipped with a good interview technique, a sheaf of psychological questionnaires, support from the US air force, navy ...”

“... on coded language that everyone understands but which can be plausibly denied. Cruz and Hatch may have been distressed by Trump’s response to Charlottesville, but neither of them objects to his policies on race, which amount to the most aggressive assault on civil rights since the Voting Rights Act was signed into law in 1965. His attorney general, Jeff ...”

“... play, The Sad Shepherd, for her monograph on Shakespeare’s great rival. Given this history, it may seem surprising that The Shakespearean Forest is not a longer book, but Barton became almost blind as a result of macular degeneration and was forced to abandon her work. When she died in 2013 it remained incomplete and its publication has been a labour of ...”

“... Faulkner reread it every year. Joyce talked about its ‘unforgettable scenes … Madness, you may call it’ – but that was the secret of its ‘genius’. Philosophers were crazy for it too. Wittgenstein, who had read it ‘an extraordinary number of times’, went around quoting bits to friends. Heidegger kept a portrait of Dostoevsky on his ...”

“... he is full of fishy thinking and his charm and the charm of the subject is so great that you may easily be fooled ... so hang on to your brains.’ This is not a piece of advice that all the contributors to this volume have been willing to follow. And though this is compensated for by the distinction of many of the papers it is unfortunately true of ...”

“... on the plain wall behind them, which parallels the line of eye contact. Even the unsententious may be inclined to feel that some smart adage about blind youth is neatly embodied here, but Bersani and Dutoit argue that Caravaggio’s paintings provide ‘a visual speculation on the meaning and condition of knowledge’ and that this clever robber is ...”

“... expulsion orders, 25 registration orders and ten prohibition orders were made, and by the end of May 1940, a total of 167 expulsion orders had been made, statistics which ignore the substantial emigration of the Irish from Britain following the Act. Originally due to expire on 28 July 1941, it was kept in force until the end of that year under wartime powers ...”

“... remembers the young and handsome John F. Kennedy’s triumph in televised debates with his rival Richard Nixon. According to legend, Nixon lost the 1960 election by his refusal to put on makeup before the broadcast. One of the more subtly interesting moments in Mad Men occurs when we see an actual Kennedy TV spot, pulled from the archives, screened in the ...”

“... that when Sir Henry Wyatt, father of the poet Sir Thomas Wyatt, was imprisoned in the Tower by Richard III he was fed by a cat which brought him a dead pigeon. In Wolf Hall this piece of family mythology becomes a tale that Sir Henry, on the edge of retirement, relates himself, with a rheumy twinkle of unreliability in his eye. A factually implausible ...”

“... should take them at face value.’ The de rigueur response to such a claim is provided by Richard Poirier: ‘Fred’s created a character named Frederick Seidel that has little to do with who he is.’ In a review of The Cosmos Poems, Calvin Bedient obligingly clears his throat before contending with the unpleasant poetry: ‘However fictive and ...”

“... family, as in: ‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’ (Richard Pevear/Larissa Volokhonsky). The implied proposition is that happy families are not much use to a novelist, and the next sentence confirms this view. ‘All was confusion in the Oblonskys’ house.’ Very promising. Throughout his life Vladimir Nabokov ...”

“... of a guillotine blade terminates any simple-minded reveries. The constant flow of objurgation may have functioned as a relief from the mental pressure of it all, but if so, the reprieve was temporary. In December 1966 he hit rock bottom. He was ‘extraordinarily depressed’, unable to get up in the morning, condemned by his ‘outsider’ status to ...”

“... political reform. In ‘a bright day, of which we already behold the dawn,’ he announced, ‘we may look forward with confidence to a state of society in which the different orders and classes of men will contribute more effectively to the support of each other than they have hitherto done.’ The essential structure of society, however, would remain ...”