“... between religion and fly fishing.’ Tom Fort’s Casting Shadows: Fish and Fishing in Britain may not qualify as ‘literature’; but it offers garrulous witness to a fine passion. Fort, who is a former fishing columnist at the Financial Times and the author of, among others, The Book of Eels, Against the Flow and The Far from Compleat Angler is a sort ...”

“... finding somewhere on the South Island a bit like ‘the Lake District’. The man who catches her, Robert Lemoine, an American billionaire and former CEO of a drone manufacturer, shuttles between disguises of his own: doomsday prepper, wannabe media baron, and, on occasion, an imaginary commanding officer at the CIA’s Special Operations Group called Lt Col ...”

“... His decision to buy the Aranda (now in the Frick Pittsburgh, the museum’s sister institution) may have been sparked by his first visit to Europe, undertaken the previous year with Andrew Mellon, who would go on to form another of the great American art collections of the early 20th century. If Frick’s trip to Europe opened his eyes to the possibilities ...”

“... 130 survived the journey.‘What is modern about him primarily is, if you wish, his anxiety,’ Robert Hughes later said of Arikha’s work. ‘His desire to pull something out of the flux of what is not known, and give it some kind of temporally stable form … Some of it is very risky stuff. This comes out particularly in the drawings.’ Arikha’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to express to the life what ecstasies and transports of the soul are, when it is so sav’d, as I may say, out of the very grave; and I do not wonder now at that custom, viz. That when a malefactor who has the halter about his neck, is tied up, and just going to be turn’d off, and has a reprieve brought to him: I say, I do not wonder that they bring a ...”

“... in imaginary space. This view allows the possibility, contrary to Aristotle, that space may be infinitely extended and that our cosmos may be only one world among many situated in such a space. Oddly enough, in his account of the impact of the Condemnation, Blumenberg does not discuss Bradwardine’s views, nor ...”

“... best friend ‘buying a jade leather coat just to match the jade line on her new car’. One may think of it as a return to the spirit of Versailles in more ways than one, but the writer felt that it demonstrated a new ‘ordered scheme of fitness’ in design – and it was undoubtedly typical of what the French understood as Modernism. The garden ...”

“... Lowry one is never far away from the thought that although there is an illness there may also be a cure.’ They obtruded and impended like the gods in the life of a Greek, but when it came down to it, they remained offstage, sat on their hands, and he gave his life to their absence. He is the one whom the gods did not save. Despite the offer ...”

“... reads his poems of the 1830s against more orthodox Tory productions by John Wilson, John Keble and Robert Montgomery, as well as some ‘vapid’ lyrics (the adjective is Tennyson’s) from the popular album collections of the period. Familiar works like ‘The Palace of Art’ and ‘The Lotus Eaters’ (both 1832; revised 1842) appear alongside poems by ...”

“... could then buy enough shares in the market to get control that way (the rule being that a predator may not buy in the market at anything above his own bid). But then, I said, what happens if the whole market takes a nose-dive and our shares and the predator’s both plunge by 30 per cent? Oh in that case, I was told, every one of your shareholders will be ...”

“... dandy’s liking for a dressing-gown); ‘splendid work’ with the Combined Cadet Force. Chatwin may have been a butterfly but he was also something of a trooper, soldiering on towards the day he would make a name for himself. ‘It was his audacity that endeared him to those people,’ he wrote in a school essay on the Dutch painter, Kees Van Dongen and the ...”

“... to dismantle an entire category of weaponry. The abrupt end of the Cold War, paradoxically, may be the reason, for with attention focused on the collapse of Soviet authority in Eastern Europe, the reunification of Germany, and ultimately the disintegration of the Soviet Union itself, arms control came to seem mundane, even irrelevant. The sense of ...”

“... of life in the intolerable Sertao (Cunha often looks at it this way). When the world is cruel you may pretend it’s about to end. But this is not all, for Vargas Llosa’s subsequent use of Eliot and Simone Weil gives us a clue to one special strength of The War of the End of the World. Where Cunha mostly invoked the language of science to explain Antonio ...”