“... of course, is still employed to legitimise Saudi rule. As guardians of Islam’s holy places and major financial contributors to Islamic institutions all over the world, the Al Saud now enjoy a quasi-caliphal role, regarding themselves as non-titular heads of an increasingly politically-conscious pan-Islamic community. This gives them a moral influence ...”

“... at a circle of readers in London and New York. (He has evidently succeeded in that aim: the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has just bestowed on him its ‘Genius Award’ – $250,000 with no strings attached.) Edward Kamau Brathwaite is also familiar with that circle, having carried off a Cholmondley Award in this country and a ...”

“... doubleness ministers to social vigilance, not to solitary complacency. In The Figure of Echo, John Hollander has recently unfolded a contrariety in Chapter 26 of the Book of Proverbs: Answer not a tool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him. Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit. Each of these ...”

“... pain’, though he adds that, if it is true that ‘classical utilitarians like Bentham and John Stuart Mill used “pleasure” ... to include achieving what one desired’ and vice versa, then ‘the difference between classical utilitarianism and utilitarianism based on interests disappears.’ In fact, achieving what one desires is not always ...”

“... the landowning class, and that most of the real fighting took place. Of course, since 1603 any major political transference of power had to be effective in both countries, and so English Jacobitism, less widespread than Scottish though no less deeply held, in many cases, was vital to success. For this reason, the only important Jacobite rising was the ...”

“... to Nicholas Hawksmoor, upon whose professional expertise he relied for the realisation of all his major buildings.’ The engineers, Arups, are Rogers’s Hawksmoor, Laurie Abbott and others his ‘Arthur’. Rogers, who was a dyslexic and could hardly read before he was 11, who even now finds that ‘ordered prose in the smallest quantities can take him ...”

“... most persistent is the myth of Orwell as the conscience of his generation. In a time when other major writers made their reputations out of formal innovation and modernist vision, Orwell made his out of rectitude; I can’t think of another modern writer whose principal virtue is generally agreed to be his virtue. This idea of Orwell has two evident ...”

“... with its evocation both of journalism and the advertising hoarding, but he stops short of such a major claim. To see Beardsley in this way, however, does little to explain his position in art history, which is much more complex and idiosyncratic than the idea that he influenced Kandinsky or Picasso by uncluttering the black-and-white print. In fact some of ...”

“... detailed accounts of his experience of paranoid schizophrenia became the focus of Freud’s only major study of a psychotic illness, and were extensively explored by Bleuler and Jaspers. Schreber was mad in the recognised sense: as with many other schizophrenics, his actions appeared to him to be controlled by rays, often people were cunning simulacra of ...”

“... interior pantomime, did not ideally suit him to army life. Nor did things improve when his friend Major-General Sir Robert Laycock arranged for his transfer from the Commandos to the Guards. If anything, his time in the Guards was even less happy than his spell as a Marine. When his superior officer, Lord Lovat, who had seen him drunk in the bar at White’s ...”

“... users, yet most people prefer to read about murder, volcanic eruptions, set-piece battles and major epidemics than do or be done to at first hand. Some people would rather read about cooking and eating than spend their lives in the kitchen. The flaw, a man with a six-inch moth on his face will argue, lies in the ease with which this method spirits me from ...”

“... affected to some degree, and looked for an explanation. ‘She called out to the country,’ Elton John sang at the funeral. But may it not have been the English Rose’s country which, in the aftermath of loss, ceased being able to call out in a traditional way? If so, a call long responded to – not really ‘down the ages’ but for quite a long ...”

“... where, with what he came to consider a ‘hysterical disregard for practicality’, he decided to major in French. For his English classes he wrote Firbankian short stories in a manner an unsympathetic tutor described as ‘rococo’, derived from ‘self-consciousness and reading’ and in some instances made ‘more than usually irritating by meagre content ...”

“... practice of political justice, both in the present and across time. It also connects with another major aspect of Hill’s work: his sense of obligation and debt to earlier English writers. The evolution of his work is indeed best understood through his changing relationships with past poets. Hill is the grammar-school-educated son of a policeman from ...”

“... The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Post-Socialist Change (1999) and more briefly in John Gray’s The Immortalisation Commission.* Preserving Lenin’s body from further decay is a bit like painting the Forth Bridge: every 18 months the body is bathed in a potassium acetate-glycerin solution and careful maintenance done on the accumulating skin ...”