“... disaster of Ira’s life seems beside the point; it is taking place on a stage far away. More immediate are the voices of the two ageing narrators as they reckon with the troubles of the past and with their own mortality. Where Ira’s story is seemingly inexorable in its lunge towards madness, the voices of the two eminently sane narrators establish ...”

“... a process quickened by the famine and emigration of the 1840s. At the same time, writers such as Thomas Moore and Samuel Ferguson were attempting to recover and absorb Gaelic literary tradition. Then, towards the end of the century, figures like Douglas Hyde and Yeats made the Celtic Revival, as it was called, a powerful cultural and political force. Their ...”

“... one of the very few contemporary philosophers who, like Brandom, have dared to write books of more than seven hundred pages, has even declared that the merit of a publication ‘must be great enough to outweigh the disservice done by its being published at all’. So the present book, billed as ‘an approachable introduction to the complex system that ...”

“... of expansive jests included, in 1618, a walk to Scotland with no money, a parody of Ben Jonson’s more famous trip of the same year, which led to his subscription-funded account of The Pennylesse Pilgrimage; or, the Moneylesse Perambulation of John Taylor, alias the Kings Majesties Water-Poet; How He TRAVAILED on Foot from London to Edenborough in ...”

“... satellites, which appear as faint streaks across his dark prints. (As in the first line of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, ‘a screaming comes across the sky,’ only here the screaming is silent.) Apart from intelligence-gathering in the present, the satellites are also space debris of the future, even eventual artefacts of an extinct ...”

“... and ‘shelter’. They were distraught to be revealed as two people (‘utter ruin to us’) and, more specifically, as two women: ‘the report of lady-authorship,’ Bradley wrote, ‘will dwarf & enfeeble our work at every turn … And we have many things to say the world will not tolerate from a woman’s lips.’But what did they want to say? In ...”

“... plantation to be shared out between the dead man’s relatives.In 1834, Douglass’s new master, Thomas Auld, a mean ‘object of contempt’, believing his authority was being challenged by his insolent teenage slave, handed him over ‘to be broken’ by an overseer called Edward Covey. ‘Mr Covey succeeded in breaking me,’ Douglass wrote, ‘in ...”

“... but one can be found in an additional note to Aubrey’s Brief Lives, which recalls him as ‘the more to be admired q[uia] he was not a company keeper, lived in Shoreditch, wouldn’t be debauched, and if invited to, writ: he was in pain.’ This sounds true in more than one way; perhaps Shakespeare did suffer from ...”

“... than ten novels, each of which is a transmogrified avatar of the previous one; we also have a more or less fully-developed love story between the above-mentioned You and Ludmilla, the Other Reader; plus, for good measure, a conspiracy-theory fiction about a secret society known as the Organisation of Apocryphal Power, run by a fiendish translator named ...”

“... his wife, four children, and two or three manuscript collections of poems, he could not have been more of an outsider. He did not know a soul in England, nor is there reason to suppose that anyone in England had ever heard of him or his work. He had not yet published a book. Only a few of his poems had appeared in relatively unstylish American magazines. He ...”

“... of the annus mirabilis, 1650, with its heresiarchs, prophets and messiahs, with John Robins and Thomas Tany, with its ‘witchcraft fits’ and speaking with tongues, provided the odium of example which sobriety needed. Davis has therefore written a book which is silly and unnecessary. No one has ever pretended that the Ranters were organised, as ...”

“... A table of contents could offer useful guidance to the structure of a work written on one or more scrolls, but there was no simple way to list and direct traffic to particular passages within them. The codex, which had elbowed the scroll aside in late antiquity, allowed for easy reference to every part of its contents. Scribes and scholars took some time ...”

“... The​ story begins with a bombardment, and it more or less ends with one too. In the spring of 1799, Admiral Sidney Smith’s naval squadron bombarded the coast at Acre, in what is now Israel, and effectively put an end to Napoleon’s dream of marching on to India in the wake of Alexander the Great. Two centuries later, another demonstration of ‘shock and awe’ lit up the night skies over Baghdad and started the latest and most ill-fated intervention by the Western allies into the territory of the old Ottoman Empire ...”

“... In 1997, in the space of four months, more than three-quarters of a million people – the highest attendance for any postwar exhibition in Germany – queued to be admitted to the Bodyworlds (Körperwelten) exhibition at the Technical and Industrial Museum in Mannheim. The show produced similar attendance figures when it moved to Japan and to the traditional European capitals of death, Vienna and Basel, where I caught up with it ...”

“... featured in and fed material to Private Eye. Introduced in his youth to Fitzrovia, he knew Dylan Thomas, Louis MacNeice and Julian Maclaren-Ross, and wrote with sufficient extra-historical purchase to make it into Margaret Drabble’s Oxford Companion to English Literature (to his immoderate delight). His memoirs were a Book at Bedtime. He received the ...”