“... through Romantic writers, and that of the Gawain poet. On a walking tour in June 1818, in Cumbria, John Keats wrote to his brother, ‘I shall henceforth write more than ever, for the abstract endeavour of being able to add a mite to that mass of beauty which is harvested from these grand materials.’ When Gawain sets off into the wilderness, he is not moved ...”

“... then further fictionalising their situation in The New Machiavelli. The editor of the Spectator, John St Loe Strachey, a pillar of the National Social Purity Crusade (no, really), foamed at the novel’s ‘poisonous and pernicious teaching’, finding it ‘in its essence depraved’ (the book, it should be said, contains no description of sexual activity ...”

“... travel for ‘ladies’). This absence is exacerbated in the recent reprints, which have retained John Craxton’s characteristic cover designs, but omitted the arresting black and white photographs taken by Joan that were included in the first editions. Despite all this, Mani and Roumeli remain extraordinarily engaging books. This is partly thanks to Leigh ...”

“... is introduced to the delights of furniture restoration – ‘the pore and lustre of different woods … the frothed grain of burled walnut’ etc – isn’t, by Tartt’s standards, very long. All the same, the book leaves an odd taste. Much of the oddness comes down to the way it handles class, which is by mapping the assumptions of a Victorian novel ...”

“... by 1943. If his books now end up in charity shops alongside discarded copies of the F-Plan Diet or John Seymour’s Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency, it’s because the shimmering and peaceable ‘England’ he promised is not, after all, to be found waiting at the end of a deserted lane, or, if it were, we’d never know, because we’d be stuck in a traffic ...”

“... well-known cultural figures who had been his friends (Dylan Thomas, George Orwell, Eric Gill and John Middleton Murry), evoking them first separately and then in some slightly dizzying comparisons: I had seen Murry working, happily absorbed and with real skill, mending fences, sawing up logs (once, too absorbed), laying down barrels of Sauerkraut, cutting ...”

“... gold. A decade after his death – and many international monetary crises later – the Bretton Woods system had collapsed and the dollar with it, while the gold price had risen to more than twenty times its old value. This gave the French Treasury one of the greatest speculative killings in history – by then the laughter had altogether ceased. De ...”

“... of India: within these loosely-defined parameters were situated schools such as Cathedral and John Connon as well as Campion, colleges like Elphinstone and St Xavier’s, the important office buildings that belonged both to the Government and to private companies, the Bombay Gymkhana club, and the Jaslok and Breach Candy Hospitals. This was where not only ...”

“... against the authoritarian powers of China and Russia and has found an influential reader in John McCain, an old-style promoter of American toughness. But it’s now quite hard to imagine Hu Jintao and Vladimir Putin, not to mention Osama bin Laden and other ‘enemies of the Free World’, quivering at the thought of a ‘concert of ...”

“... her. Hannah and her new mistress run away, and undergo harrowing adventures. They live in the woods, on berries and wild fruits, but are tracked down by agents of the far-reaching Trappe, and are imprisoned in ‘Egyptian’ darkness, in a dungeon where they fear being eaten alive by rats. A pencilled correction (by whom?) has changed ‘Egyptian’ to ...”

“... found expression, were prerequisites of writing serious poems a century later. Eliot’s praise of John Davidson’s ‘Thirty Bob a Week’ as ‘the only poem in which Davidson freed himself completely from the poetic diction of English verse of his time’, so that ‘the poem is to me a great poem for ever’ may seem excessive. When one compares ...”

“... When he refers to Heidegger, he doesn’t mean the philosopher but the operatic impresario John James Heidegger (c.1665-1749). In Literature and Popular Culture in 18th-Century England, as in his Grub Street (1972) and its abridged version Hacks and Dunces (1980), he proposes to describe ‘how things were’ or how they seemed to be to the people who ...”

“... of the Apocalypse reappear in the angel’s dialectical relationship with the storm. But unlike John the Revelator, who was told to ‘seal up those things which the thunders uttered and write them not’, Benjamin wrote down what the thunders said, for in the violence of the storm he seems to have heard the still small voice of Kant, arguing for ...”

“... Browne and Congreve as well as such less remembered figures as the sea captain Robert Knox, and John Chilton, who, Macdonald speculates, was ‘probably’ the author of Voyage to the West Indies … in the year 1560. The penalty for wearing so much learning lightly was, at this midpoint in her career, to be patronised by the more severe and humourless ...”

“... and sees a man who reminds her of the drifter in the doorway of a gas station. They drive to the woods on the edge of town and together sink down to ‘that great dark ocean bed where there were no faces or names but only shadowy bodies you reached out to in order to calm yourself’. When she gets home, the ground beneath her feet is ‘solid and ...”