“... sung poems from epic and tragedy. Aristotle, who had a strong preference for narrative forms, more or less shrugs off this type of poetry. If he had made a few more observations about lyric then Western thinking on the subject might have been less of a muddle than it was to become. The word ‘lyric’ came to be used ...”

“... amid every short cut to Irishness – shamrocks, Guinness, lots of green things – while a little more knowledge may attach to him the legend that he is responsible for Ireland’s lack of snakes, having ordered them all to leave. The picture becomes more complicated for those who have discovered that he wasn’t Irish at ...”

“... are capacious is their ability to contain, within themselves, imaginary books: books that the more literal-minded real world isn’t yet able to realise. Borges’s short fiction is teeming with them. In ‘The Library of Babel’, Borges imagines a library ‘composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries’. The library is ...”

“... Thomas Babington Macaulay – later Lord Macaulay, and ‘Tom’ to Catherine Hall – was the most influential of all British historians. Sales of the first two volumes of his great History of England, published in 1848, rivalled those of Scott and Dickens. The main reason for his popularity, apart from his literary style, was that he flattered the English by crediting them with a unique history of evolving ‘freedom ...”

“... of the Bellahouston Scholarship’ (published in Lean Tales, 1985) – turns out to be nothing more nor less than a report to the trustees of the Bellahouston Scholarship (a travel fund for gifted young painters), written after Gray was awarded one in the late 1950s. This is a writer whose disregard for even the most clearly defined artistic boundaries ...”

“... to extensive correspondence with the great and the good . . . The procedure I followed with the more intimate letter was to type it onto my laptop, double spaced in large font, and print it out. My employer – the sender of the letter – would then copy it painstakingly onto embossed notepaper using a Mont Blanc pen and blotting paper, signing it with a ...”

“... per thousand, by Eigen’s estimate) and they track the evolution of mental diagnoses into ever more precise and legally inflected forms. Until 1800, Eigen has established, ‘English legal opinion had mandated that only a total madness – a complete want of understanding and memory’ – could compel a not guilty verdict. After that date the category of ...”

“... pretty final, and designed to lead us badly astray. But Nietzsche turns out to be up to something more complicated. His complete assertion was: ‘Against the positivism which halts at phenomena – “There are only facts” – I would say: no, facts are just what there aren’t, there are only interpretations.’ This means, I take it, that to someone who ...”

“... injury done to one is an injury done to all. But Newman’s medieval case studies also suggest a more troubling possibility: that a person’s sense of self can dissolve under the pressure of external interference both demonic and divine.The stories Newman tells reveal the profound strangeness of the Middle Ages. In these pages, demons torment a holy woman ...”

“... and 1671. They would also have known the story of Alexander Selkirk, the naval officer who spent more than four years living as a castaway on an island off the coast of Chile before being rescued in 1709 – Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe (1719) was partly based on this episode. Improbably enough, one of the Wager’s sailors was called William ...”

“... Grant only persevered with their abstract arrangements for two years or so, before reverting to more Fauvist and figurative work. Abstraction never took hold in England, either in Bloomsbury or in the Vortex. Butler, I think, is inclined to exaggerate the differences between the two, both of whom briefly and almost simultaneously experimented with ...”

“... with long chapters about the two grandfathers. Bertie (pronounced ‘Bartie’) Mitford and Thomas ‘Tap’ Bowles were both tremendous swells. They looked rather similar, something like Edward Elgar, and when they were in the House of Commons they worked together in a spirited, efficient and defiantly independent manner, never as lobby-fodder. Neither ...”

“... is an unusually extreme statement for an expatriate Irish writer to make, and one result of the more moderate and ambivalent contemporary attitude is that critics nowadays believe that Irish writers have always been similarly moderate. Thus the influence of the Fenians on Wilde, Yeats and Joyce has been overlooked or minimised, and their work has been ...”

“... of the lot is the last, a well-researched and level-headed biography that tells us considerably more about Joseph Merrick than we knew before. For example: Treves recorded that he carried about with him, as his most cherished possession, the photograph of a woman he identified as his mother. This led Ashley Montagu to speculate that, unlike Alexander ...”

“... appropriately reverberant thunderclap, the long epoch of therapeutic nihilism described by Lewis Thomas in his most recent book.* The insulin story begins, of course, as other medical stories begin, at the bedside – with the taking of a history and an appraisal of the patient’s general health. The history would be loss of weight, debility and general ...”