“... Denis Donoghue begins, a little self-indulgently, by reprinting six short BBC talks on ‘Words’. The excuse is that such radio talks offer a simple if incomplete model for Donoghue’s conception of literary discourse: as an address to an invisible audience, or dialogue for ever aborted by the absence of a second party ...”

“... at the Crown Hotel, Everleigh, where he had been staying for five days at a house party hosted by J.M. Keynes. The cause of Rupert’s distress was the departure that day of Noel Olivier, to go climbing in Switzerland. Her elder sister Brynhild had left with her, off to climb in Wales with Hugh Popham, to whom she had just become engaged. Moping in his ...”

“... Acres, a transposition of King Lear to contemporary Iowa. Larry Cook is an ageing farmer who, by dint of hard work, canny management and lack of aversion to profiting from the misfortunes of others, has built up his farm to 1000 acres. ‘The seemingly stationary fields are always flowing toward one farmer and away from another. The lesson my father might ...”

“... Shop.’ Most County grounds have an establishment like this, where anything that can reasonably be sold at a profit – papers, sweets, magazines, cricket shirts, canned drinks, books – is stocked. Mrs Eaton’s shop, a Portakabin located at the back of the terracing in the forecourt to the ground, has all this and more. In one corner is her coffee ...”

“... his folly (and must underwrite much of its cost)’. It is precisely that conflict that ought to be visible in the Odyssey, the poem not of war, but of the aftermath of war. Yet, despite the Odyssey’s ‘primitive vestiges’, despite the ‘repressed material, old and interesting’, that comes ‘struggling out’, the women are not given the voice to ...”

“... Early theorists of humour considered it a form of speech rather than writing. And speech could be extremely dangerous, as the Bible warned: ‘Death and life are in the power of the tongue’ (Proverbs); ‘The tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity’ (James). Elsewhere in scripture the tongue is compared to a razor, a sword, a bow, an arrow – words were ...”

“... as columnists speculate about whether he will run for a second term in 2024, at the age of 81, or be replaced by a pundit’s dream ticket of Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg. The spectre of Trump remains, at least in the obsessive minds of those who believe the vandalism done to the Capitol on 6 January was a catastrophe ...”

“... Breton to explore a variety of practices in multiple locales. This ambitious show, co-curated by Matthew Gale of Tate Modern and Stephanie D’Alessandro of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (where it appeared last autumn), is filled to the brim with paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, films and documents from an extraordinary array of ...”

“... If​ Britain votes to leave the EU it will take several years to disentangle what’s to be kept and what discarded from our EU-saturated legislation. The law of the European Union has left few areas of life in the UK wholly untouched even though the EU can only legislate in areas for which it derives what are known as ‘competences’ from the treaties member states have ratified ...”

“... is destroyed’, he told an audience in 1882, ‘capital will not flow, enterprise cannot be created, wages must fall, and commerce must stagnate’. It was a neat formulation, deployed to dent the case for radical reforms that would, in the Tory worldview, destabilise the polity by setting ‘class against ...”

“... moving across a rock; images of clouds, of decaying fruit; portraits on film of people who won’t be around much longer, or who have already died. Landscape, her exhibition at the newly expanded Royal Academy (until 12 August), begins with a scene of snow-covered mountains, The Montafon Letter, 12 feet high and 24 feet wide, done in chalk on nine blackboards ...”

“... the bonxie swipes. They nest on open ground; stray too close, and the bonxie will drive you away by flying straight at your head. (Once, on North Rona, my friend Stuart and I were walking along when a bonxie took exception to us. It came in fast, misjudged its height and walloped Stuart so hard it burst his eardrum.)I could see the Bass on the horizon on the ...”

“... Almost five years ago the Cape Town publishing company David Philip brought out Way Up Way Out, a novel by Harold Strachan. Some time later I was sent a copy of the book by a friend of Strachan’s in KwaZulu-Natal, where the author himself has lived much of his life ...”

“... before, against his will, because his mother could no longer look after him. Having been persuaded by some friends that he was being taken out in a sedan chair to visit another acquaintance, he was conveyed instead to a cell in the asylum, a sepulchrous building abutting the old city wall. On discovering the ruse, a contemporary biographer wrote, Fergusson ...”

“... campaign contained policies which they claimed would counter the ‘demographic problem’ posed by the Palestinian presence in Israel. Ariel Sharon proposed the pull-out from Gaza as the best solution to it; the leaders of the Labour Party endorsed the wall because they believed it was the best way of limiting the number of Palestinians inside ...”