“... That union causes the first conflict in the history of the universe. Afraid that his children may succeed him, Heaven tries to keep them inside Earth’s body, an ‘evil act’ which is met with ‘an evil plan’. Earth manufactures a sickle, arms her unborn son Kronos, and makes him castrate his father. Kronos eventually becomes the ruler of the ...”

“... a human performer impersonating a satyr, and the garlanded wine jar on the stand next to him may be the competition prize. We don’t know where Vibius Philippus was working, but Marsyas had a statue in the Forum in Rome, where he was seen as a symbol of liberty. Dionysiac imagery appeared on vases and bronzes all over Italy at this time, as did scenes ...”

“... its ironic blending of high and low, its whispered implication that things might be different. May not the Linnin of a Tiburn slave, More honour then a mighty Monarke have? That though he dyed a Traytor most disloyall, His Shirt may be transform’d to Paper royall. And may not dirty ...”

“... Toft was suffering a violent and protracted miscarriage. But what exactly had she miscarried? It may have been a malformed placenta or foetus, or, as Karen Harvey suggests, a teratoma – a tumour containing bones, tissues, hair, teeth and flesh that can develop anywhere in the body.Whatever came out of Mary Toft after that long day in the fields, it seems ...”

“... the heart of Norse mythology is the Fimbulwinter, three winters with no summers in between, which may once have been a fact.In desperate circumstances, the poor die but the survivors expand their holdings. The famine may well have strengthened the post-Roman militarised elites who have left their traces in the giant mounds ...”

“... meaning to the very limits’? Can history live by metaphors alone? One answer is yes – we may want to hang on to biographical interpretations at any price.But there are tracks that respect historical destinies and also lead in other directions. Rimbaud himself announced such a possibility when he memorably said, in letters to friends, that ‘I is ...”

“... have argued – persuasively, in my view – that the traditional check-list of Defoe’s output may considerably exaggerate the number of items written by him. Backscheider appears unhappy at this revisionist attempt to cut her author down to size. Her prefatory note that ‘my own use of the received canon is conservative’ is itself ambiguous. It appears ...”

“... since they continue to provide us with so much of our vocabulary. Europa stands for Europe, we may wish to say, just as Narcissus is the original narcissist and Harmony is harmony. The divine rapes (and much else) in Greek myth have been interpreted as figuring military invasions. At a more general level, they can be seen as a projection of the supposed ...”

“... or if it does, whether he is not asking himself if his instinctive personal reaction to a question may not be misguided or inadequate. Sometimes the message emerges from the dialogue itself, as the characters combine to build up a collective understanding of which each would have been incapable in isolation. None of this makes it possible to present Diderot as ...”

“... Lives of the Poets, though Johnson says his diction was ‘florid and luxuriant ... and sometimes may be charged with filling the ear more than the mind.’ Without comparing the two Thomsons, Leonard shows by quotation that the Victorian (1834-82) is the greater poet. He shows, too, that the later Thomson’s life reflects the state of Britain more fully ...”

“... another magus, Robert Graves, the feminine for Redgrove is a source of spiritual energy which men may tap for their own health, and he advocates a form of material mysticism mediated through female bodies. But there’s something rather creepy about his enthusiasm. His version of the Grimms’ Cinderella, Ashiepaddle, shows her as a white witch, who has ...”

“... is with the working life of shoelaces and the rival hypotheses (there are two contenders) which may be adduced to explain not only how they come to break but also how one shoelace will snap within days of the other. This is the argumentative mainstream, into which, however, flow frequent tributaries in the form of disquisitions on ...”

“... into stillness again.The doubling of consciousness, in which the figure straying across the field may be no more than a figment of the figure hunched at the table – the mind observing itself, in the third person, in the act of imagining – is present in most of Beckett’s later prose texts. So is the contrast between inner and outer, between the confined ...”

“... in order to take in the food that I see in the centre, and, at an earlier stage, some other sense may have told me which way to go in order to get into the position to eat. Our philosophical tradition is a very theoretical one and it is easy for us to forget how much our own actions contribute to the picture of the world around us. We think of the world as ...”