“... Europe with her tubercular sister and widowed mother: a series of autobiographical sketches – more rosy and much more plaintive than her books for children – record her wailing at schools, romping in orchards, screaming at the dark in strange lodging-houses. As a young woman, she had written verses about wild wet ...”

“... Camp, the Justice of the Jewish Pogrom, the Tranquillity of Imperialist War’). But probably more popular with most readers were the complaints about corporal punishment, compulsory OTC and the restrictive rules of girls’ schools, as well as the upbeat reassurances about masturbation. In the fourth and final issue, ‘a doctor’ wrote to dispel the ...”

“... and then all the stars of heaven will cascade to the ground. The events of the third day may seem more benign: the sea shall ‘stand even in his cours agayn … with-outen mare rysng or fallyng’. But in the hurly-burly of apocalypse, a placid sea can be unnerving too.The ebb and flow of water was essential to medieval understandings of time. As Chaucer put ...”

“... sciences teaches no moral lesson, offers no spiritual comfort, have concluded that science is no more than the handmaiden of technology. These philosophers have ranged themselves alongside the political utopian and the innovative artist. Whereas the first kind of philosopher (a kind common in Britain and America, and exemplified by even such relatively ...”

“... at the Bedford Assizes in February 1658, probably following a complaint from the local vicar, Thomas Becke, who was a Presbyterian. Bunyan’s legal torments began in earnest when he was invited to preach at the hamlet of Lower Samsell on 12 November 1660. When he got there, a friend told him there was rumoured to be a warrant for his arrest, but he ...”

“... of a sheet of paper between the right and the wrong of this affair.’ Marlow murmurs: ‘How much more did you want?’ Jim can’t forget his guilt and can’t face it either, and Marlow arrives at a philosophical conclusion: ‘The truth seems to be that it is impossible to lay the ghost of a fact.’ Marlow can’t have known that he was sketching a theory ...”

“... fit for purpose. No doubt the visitors partly wanted the Italians to appear like that – it was more romantic. They were fascinated by the dilapidated interior lives of the old palazzi, and half-longed to follow their inhabitants inside – but you can usually detect condescension and exasperation entangled with their interest. Could the Italians really be ...”

“... conscious enough to beg his friend to shoot him again. Fallada, who was short-sighted, fired three more bullets: one for Necker, two for himself. The first entered his lung, the other narrowly missed his heart. Stumbling back down the path to Rudolstadt, he was found by a forester who took him to hospital. His mother’s first reaction to her son attempting ...”

“... As with many of those who are dependent for their status on the high status of others – none more than Spender, who thought ‘continually of those who were truly great’ – there appeared to be a measure of disdain in the well-stirred cocktail of familiarity. He had met the little novelist in the spring of 1928, and Isherwood later recalled ...”

“... the single currency has turned into a monetary choke-lead, forcing a swathe of economies – more than half the Eurozone’s population – into perpetual recession. The Greek economy has shrunk by a fifth, wages have fallen by 50 per cent and two-thirds of the young are out of work. In Spain, it is now commonplace for three generations to survive on a ...”

“... at each other in a brotherly way, and their teeth were equally white.’ A live animal is so much more fascinating than the splendid doll, for reasons that underlie the erotics Marquard Smith explores in his peculiar and highly equivocal study. Yet a doll promises everything the rat in a cage can give and more: she/he/it ...”

“... of superiority. He compared Eliot the critic to a father punishing a naughty child: ‘It hurts me more than it does you, Charlie.’ In Eliot’s prose, he said, ‘one smells the sadist.’ At the age of 26 Thayer went to Chicago to see if he could earn his own living for a month. ‘I want to show you,’ he wrote to Elaine, then his fiancée, who was also ...”

“... course the clay breaks and the bronze goes on.’ What was true of those monastic summers was even more true of Lowell’s relationship with women. In love as in friendship Lowell was controlling and vulnerable, caring and neglectful, destructive and helpless to fix the damage. He was married three times: to Jean Stafford from 1940 to 1948, to Elizabeth ...”

“... increase in London’s size and wealth. The city’s population tripled between 1600 and 1720 to more than 600,000 people. Its docks grew busier, its fleets larger, its merchants ever richer. Between the 1660s and the 1680s, imports of sugar from West Indian slave plantations into London tripled in value; every year, two thousand ships queued up to offload ...”

“... one in three of the 230 works arouse a desire to have them in a permanent collection here, but no more than three of the rooms in the show give a feeling of satisfaction. The first is Gallery Nine at Burlington House, a square room where superb Frank Steallas of his black period confront us from the back wall while in the middle of the floor, humped in ...”