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“... bring in a goddess among the characters: it revolts me. Then not unnaturally, as it seemed to me, her speech is the worst in the play: being an unreality she must talk unreal. Believe me, the Greek gods are a totally unworkable material; the merest frigidity, which must chill and kill every living work of art they are brought into… . [They ...”

“... literacy by writing their names. One of the women, however, ‘had trouble gripping the pen with her flat, stubby thumb with no fingerprint, yet haltingly, she still managed to write her name’. Her thumb is ‘as flat as a spatula’. When a guest stares at it, astonished, the landlord ...”

“... statues. His second marriage, to Elizabeth Hardwick, was essentially an enduring one, and her devotion and intelligence illuminate and support this biography. Other women promised a new leaf, and eventually there was the romance of a departure for England: ‘a new alliance’, as he put it, ‘and a new country’. This was not, he said, another of ...”

“... our poising of obscure desires, What Minotaur in irritable matched burnings Yearns and shall gore her intricate my fires. Haffenden has some useful remarks on the poems, not unlike those of the Granta reviewer on the play: they try to solve the contradictions between the world of science and the feeling of being human; in the circumstances of the late ...”

“... Anglicano Defensio Secunda, or Second Defence of the English People, which Barbara Lewalski, in her biography, oddly calls his ‘least attractive work’, Milton gives thanks to God chiefly for three reasons. The first, in George Burnett’s 1809 translation, is that I was born in those times of my country, when the effulgent virtue of its citizens ...”

“... no one much looks at, in St Stephen’s Green. When Nora stood Joyce up on 14 June, he wrote to her ardently, demanding another date. They met on 16 June, which is when their story began, and when Ulysses both began and ended. Lucky it wasn’t on Good Friday, when the pubs are closed. I wonder if the pubs closed on Good Friday in 1904, under the ...”

“... into my car with difficulty. My mother, who was with me that day, was unusually quiet as I drove her home. She simply said: ‘If you open that suitcase you’ll never close it again.’While she enjoys certain kinds of complication (seating mourners correctly at a funeral, insulting someone with a second-class stamp, genealogy), my mother has an aversion to ...”

“... even though in the Iliad Agamemnon swears ‘by the greatest of oaths’ that he never went into her bed or slept with her (no Clintonesque reservations here, please), while Achilles calls Briseïs his darling wife, adding: ‘I loved her with all my heart though I had captured ...”

“... a raised terrace, an idea Utzon had first met studying classical Chinese architecture, where the majesty of a ruler was expressed by the height on which his palace stood, and his power by the flights of stairs his subjects had to climb to see him. In Utzon’s thinking, the terrace has another significance: it emphasises the separation of the timeless arts ...”

“... pristine newcomer, just a little fatter and rounder than the six Tunnel Boring Machines that dug her out, prepares for its rendezvous with the admired brickwork of Joseph Bazalgette’s overwhelmed Victorian outflow. Such imaginative solutions were required, at whatever the cost (in the end it was £4.3 billion), to reduce the horror of the raw sewage and ...”

“... average childhood, it was down to Addie Parker, who toiled hard and made his future the focus of her life. None of the books pries very far under this bright but somewhat inert picture. The near suffocating attention Addie lavished on Charlie feels not entirely healthy: maybe not the full Oedipal, but definitely on the doorstep. Routes around limited ...”

“... called out: ‘Come, O Manat, show the anger of which you are capable!’ Manat began to pull out her hair and beat her breasts in despair, while cursing her tormentors. Sa’d beat her to death. Only then did his 20 companions join him. Together they ...”

“... seemed cruel to the poor little dressmaker outside, it may be believed that it did not strike her as an abode of mercy while she pursued her devious way into the circular shafts of cells … there were walls within walls and galleries on top of galleries; even the daylight lost its colour.’Millbank Prison had played ...”

“... was for a time regarded by Thatcher as the nearest thing to a soulmate she had in Europe. But to her disappointment he domesticated rather than crushed the trade unions, and mindful of the golden rule of consensus, administered only moderate doses of privatisation and welfare reduction. Bolkestein, by contrast, had read his Hayek and was contemptuous of such ...”