“... in the American academy at a moment when the amateur reader, on the evidence of her own book, may have the feeling that the weeds are taking over the garden. This is a shame, because the points she makes in The Scandal of Pleasure seem not just right, but indisputable: books and pictures are not newspaper leaders and shouldn’t be treated as if they ...”

“... is history in a nutshell.’ And indeed it is. But whose history? Exemplary as this Irish martyr may be, the priest is unable to identify him because he does not feature in the standard martyrology of Irish nationalism. He is, of course, Oscar Wilde. By the time this satirical scene occurs, two-thirds of the way through At Swim, Two Boys, Jamie O’Neill’s ...”

“... what he could bear, the pain he could shrug off, the warmth or comfort he could deny himself. It may be the stuff of a thousand blighted lives and of dozens of novels, but the hurt and amazement come fresh off the page. You may despise the lesson, but you had better learn it; of his adult self, John Burnside tells ...”

“... since a small selection was included in the prose collection In the Green Tree (1948): ‘It may be,’ Walter Allen wrote in the New Statesman, ‘that these letters will ultimately take a higher place than either the poetry or the stories for, like Keats’s, they point to a maturity beyond anything their author had been able to express in his ...”

“... first children, twin sons, were born in 1639; she was last pregnant in 1662, so her children may have frequented the schoolroom for rather more than twenty years; her translation of Lucretius could have taken her as long. Though she claimed to be ashamed of having defiled the streams of truth ‘with this Pagan mud’, she kept her translation by her and ...”

“... so on. The heart was missing, however: ‘the pericardium was open below & the heart absent.’ It may have been burned in the fireplace, which bore evidence of a ‘fire so large as to melt the spout off the kettle’. More probably it was taken away by the killer. This is another of Jack’s signatures: what is known in the lexicons of Ripperology as the ...”

“... a chilly forehead and a warm thigh, or St Simeon, being written by the tip of his stylus? You may prefer Marguerite Porete, burning alive with her book, or the rich black intersection of St John of the Cross or the pyroclastic whisper of Anonymous, Unknown Author. Or something a little closer to home – Jeannie, for instance, the family friend whom my ...”

“... order to demonstrate that I have not inadvertently farted. The secretary looks up inquiringly. She may just be thinking I am uncomfortable. She may, on the other hand, be thinking I have farted, and not once but three times. I am attending a funeral. It is crowded with mourners, many of them friends and acquaintances. I do ...”

“... here the bombing is terrible. I hope the same thing never comes to Glasgow. Tell Annie, Jeannie, May, Katie and them all I was asking for them. I hope you and the kids are keeping well I will be here for some time yet. I will draw to a close sending you and the kids my best love. Michael A thin strip of darkness, the U-boat U.99, commanded by the ...”

“... vocation, for himself and his successors’. The Larkin-Davie standoff oversimplifies matters, as Robert Lowell intimated when he said that the two poets who meant most to him were Pound and Hardy. This might seem an unlikely double-act, yet more than half a century earlier Pound had suggested that Hardy be included in an anthology of Imagist poetry, and had ...”

“... novels and adapting them for the silver screen. As the song says: ‘Go out and try your luck/You may be Donald Duck/Hooray for Hollywood.’ America had always been a percentage play, and Hollywood was the fabulous embodiment of the nation’s faith in pluck and luck. To a society that fancied itself a Redeemer Nation, the bonanza of stars, paydays and lush ...”

“... reader, two warnings should be offered. The opening chapter, about Church and State, may seem the hardest: begin with Chapter Two. Secondly, do not expect tidy answers. Collinson’s thesis, although lucidly and vigorously presented, is honourably complex and tentative. This is the modern manner, history with its head ...”

“... of the Craiglockhart in-house magazine, the Hydra, of which Owen was the editor, and the following May was awarded a consolation prize in a poetry competition organised by the Bookman. His next poem, ‘Has Your Soul Sipped?’, also makes use of pararhyme, insistent alliteration and languorous, decadent, erotic diction: ‘Sweeter than nocturnes/Of the wild ...”

“... there when it was just a military prison. For penologists, the most intriguing part of Alcatraz may be the material that shows how many prisoners made another life after release. Was there something in the hours of solitary reflection and reading that enlarged their lives? Another legend was that Alcatraz was escape-proof. The structure of the prison was ...”

“... than reverential. Piper’s heyday coincided with that of Ealing Studios; indeed, his posters for Robert Hamer’s Pink String and Sealing Wax and Charles Crichton’s Painted Boats were demonstratively appropriate, though Googie Withers dolled up like a Staffordshire figure in front of a spread of Kemp Town Georgian exerted rather more box office pull than ...”