“... on the breasts ... Perhaps the effects are more painful when someone else strikes.’ The passage is well printed alongside a carefully placed facsimile of a bad drawing of the famous loins with the parts blacked in ‘where it is good and sharp’. Yet despite the grand presentation of excess (Grainger’s letters, like Wagner’s, sometimes read as ...”

“... have known them all already, known them all’ is echoed in the beginning of this passage and even more closely in an earlier rundown of dead passengers: ‘I for one know them all ... I think I know them.’ But, most of all, the accents are those of an ironic, plaintively knowing Tiresias, a variation on The Waste Land’s variation on ...”

“... family. Some of the posters were ‘political’: ‘Diana – the only jewel in the crown’; ‘Charles, you’ve lost the best thing you ever had. Good luck to Wills and Harry,’ said one poster stuck to the railings of Buckingham Palace. As many people noted, the whole atmosphere was very ‘democratic’: rarely can the railings of our royal palaces ...”

“... Napoleon Bonaparte and his chief diplomat, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, are usually seen as the oddest of history’s odd couples. One personified boldness, ambition and overblown operatic passion; the other, subtlety, irony and world-weary cynicism. One displayed such restless physical energy that contemporaries repeatedly reached for that newly hatched adjective ‘electric’ to describe him; the other was sickly, pallid and had a club foot ...”

“... contradictions’. Two of the most stylish essays are by John Daverio, who drowned in the Charles River in Boston in March 2003, a death that may have been accidental but eerily echoes Schumann’s plunge into the Rhine at a similar time of year. His first essay surveys Schumann’s early piano music, dwelling on its exuberant play with masks and ...”

“... a departure and which are still displayed and proposed in the face of it. To be unmoved by such a passage, and to resist it, is in effect to resist all Bloch. But even those who feel compelled to do so on principle, or for some other reason, may yet recognise the injustice of Kolakowski’s charge that facts for Bloch ‘have no ontological meaning and may be ...”

“... in every language, Therefore unreal, out beyond a gap No one can cross, figures inside a mirror. Charles Boyle – a stouter Carcanet poet – would sooner lose his touring bike, his rucksack, all his travellers cheques, than admit such diminution. Ranging between London and North Africa, Israel and somewhere (close to Jamestown?) called Merriland, his new ...”

“... by himself. In the superb catalogue of the exhibitions devoted to Vasari in Arezzo in 1981, Charles Davis subjected this passage to careful scrutiny. He discovered that many of Alessandro Farnese’s dinner guests listed by Vasari were dead or absent from Rome at the time, and pointed out that this account of the ...”

“... his wrecking of that achievement – to dehumanise Melville as man and artist.’ This summarising passage cannot be called literary criticism; it is a plea of sorts, not on behalf of Pierre but of Melville. Like the Introduction as a whole, the passage fudges the critical issues it raises. Why, one wants to know, is ...”

“... organic intellectual of the EU. Though related, applause and achievement are not the same. The Passage to Europe: How a Continent Became a Union, which catapulted van Middelaar to fame and the precincts of power, is a remarkable work. The tones in which it was received are of another order. ‘There are books,’ a Belgian reviewer declared, ‘before ...”

“... and massive enforced population movement. On 6 May 1527 the Spanish, German and Italian troops of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain, sacked the city, assaulting and slaughtering its citizens, pillaging and violating sacred spaces and objects. The level of violence reported in eyewitness accounts shocked the rest of Europe, even after decades of ...”

“... of not yielding much if you give it the attention which its thought-provoking air solicits. The passage is also hard, indeed impossible, to reconcile with the idea that Victorian bourgeois sexual plenitude was a rebellion against restraint: but at an earlier point Professor Gay elaborates his Flaubertian title as a ‘re-education of the senses’. And he ...”

“... not the habitual ones, so that ‘everyone recognises me in my book and my book in me.’ In a passage added late in life, he describes the effects of continuing self-description: ‘By portraying myself for others I have portrayed my own self within me in clearer colours than I possessed at first. I have not made my book any more than it has made me – a ...”

“... with brutal and emotionless judgment,’ she says. Only later will she come to sympathise, in a passage that seems inspired by Betty Friedan: ‘How she must have sat in the empty kitchen, the table smelling of the domestic rot of the sponge, and waited for me to clatter in from school, for my father to come home.’ One afternoon, Evie sees a curious group ...”

“... to build an house unto the name of the Lord my God, as the Lord spake unto David my father.This passage is very close indeed to the translation in the Matthew Bible of 1537 (by William Tyndale) and there are just two differences from the King James Bible of 1611 (‘evil occurrent’ in place of ‘any evil plague’; ‘purpose’ for ‘am ...”