“... looser horizontals of the water below.Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan was born in 1872 in Amersfoort, a small, devoutly religious city at the centre of the Netherlands. (He dropped the second ‘a’ from his surname in 1909 at the insistence of his uncle, Frits Mondriaan, also a painter, who was ashamed of his nephew’s ‘depraved’ art.) His father, the first ...”

“... to suck out the spirit until it looks the way you think it should. We are all historians in our small way. And in some ghastly way Pol Pot was more honest than the rest of us have been. Pol Pot decided to dispense with the past altogether. To dispense with the sham of treating the past with objective respect. In Cambodia the cities were to be wiped ...”

“... to the magnitude of the earth’. In her more recent Faber Book of Contemporary American Poetry, Helen Vendler has made a comparable point, arguing that geographically and topographically there must be many American poetries: ‘There will be no American landscape that does not speak in words as well as in line and colour.’ I am hoping to suggest that ...”

“... Last December​ , in Russia for the first time, I saw a small panel painting in the Hermitage showing The Vision of St Augustine: the saint, in full episcopal fig, is sitting on a riverbank near a child who is scooping up water with a spoon and pouring it into a hole in the sand. According to the story, which is usually set on a beach, the saint is asking the little boy what he thinks he’s up to; to which the child replies that he’s trying to empty the sea into the hole ...”

“... where the people are corrupt, democracy is immoral (though it is easy enough to imagine, say, a small community in which a clear majority vote to torment a racial minority). Professor Barton sticks up for the plebeians. She argues strenuously that, even if they did hang back and refuse ‘to thread the gates’ as Coriolanus says, they did show courage in ...”

“... examples in her own work of the use of the word ‘tell’ to indicate an act of discernment. ‘Helen and Vi: A Study in Health and Vitality’ even includes a latter-day Homais. ‘Her grandfather taught the children to recognise certain healthful wild plants, and in particular to tell the male from the female of certain flowers, since each had different ...”

“... offers no explanation, but by including this strange remark invites our curiosity. Steventon was a small community that had known Jane all her life, and James too – along with his second wife Mary Lloyd, whom Jane Austen disliked for her unkindness to her stepdaughter Anna and her meanness over money. A common reason why an author’s friend or relative ...”

“... muscles, all the mucous membranes have to play their role in this magnificent symphony.’ Most small children adore the obvious pleasure of pleasure; what the adults politely call ‘affection’ is often irresistible to the child’s profoundly sensual self. It is this, along with their intense, sometimes daunting suffering, that adults find most ...”

“... well placed to understand. The flow of working people to the cities had always been matched by a small but steady trickle in the opposite direction of manufacturers made good seeking to clamber onto the lower-upper-class rung of society with the purchase of a country estate. Country houses continued to grow in number as the way of life that was needed to ...”

“... of epic, in which allusions to heroic fictions at once give sanction to and emphasise the small scale of an individual life, was vital for Heaney’s later work. It enabled what might be called postcolonial parallax, in which a master text of a dominant civilisation is deliberately transformed from the ostentatiously low perspective of an unheroic ...”

“... for Sianne Ngai, a critic and theorist with a habit, as she puts it, of hanging large coats on small pegs. Her field of research is the relation between aesthetics and ideology, viewed from a post-Marxist perspective, and she has already made two strikingly original contributions to that field. Ugly Feelings (2005) provides a sweeping yet fine-grained ...”

“... project slips imperceptibly into a wordy one, and the more wordy the less reliable. Here is a small example of what I mean, from page 15 of Joyce’s Politics. We are told that ‘at the earliest stage of development’, Stephen’s mind is exposed to ‘the Irish world of politics’ in the form of Dante’s two brushes representing Michael Davitt and ...”

“... a family as much as with a person, just as E.M. Forster did with the family of Bob Buckingham and Helen Schlegel does with the Wilcoxes in Howards End, thinking she has found a way of life to love, or a lost tribe to which she might belong. Whatever the anxieties, a writer’s style will often enough be a homemade affair, a mesh of material discovered and ...”

“... reviewing, Literaturwissenschaft and Tageskritik, but it is still the case there that a remarkably small number of people, considering the potential size of the public, actually read what the reviewers review, and of those only a few pay much attention to what they read in that line, their notion of an interesting book being different from that of the ...”

“... in which he protests her superiority to mythical heroines of every stripe, from Andromeda to Helen. However crazy her behaviour, she proceeded always with absolute confidence, brooking neither argument nor delay. Though she caused havoc almost wherever she went, for Graves these conflicts were evidence of her ineffable, otherworldly ...”