“... the Upper East Side. His son Jared, an art student specialising in industrial sculpture (the next Richard Serra, even), started to make it his home. Young Jared took pleasure in the neighbourhood, dirty and dangerous as it was, with homeless people and intravenous drug users camping out in Tompkins Square Park, and was surprised when a contingent of ...”

“... young?3 June, Yorkshire. A lovely dinner last night: poached sole, dauphinoise potatoes, fresh broad beans and some samphire. R. was disappointed the spuds weren’t creamier, though this was because he was stingy with the cream. It suited me though and I cleaned my plate, as he almost invariably does his.10 June. Books read:Revelations, the biography of ...”

“... in the middle of a field.20 January. Collected by the New Yorker and taken to be photographed by Richard Avedon, now a grey-haired faun of 72 who says he’s bored with taking snapshots in the studio (this morning Isaiah Berlin and Stephen Spender) and wants to photograph me outside. ‘Outside’ means that eventually I find myself perched up a tree in Hyde ...”

“... letters supposedly showing Parnell’s complicity in the Phoenix Park murders had been forged by Richard Pigott. The Commission Report did seem to support the Tory case that Irish agrarian violence had been in part because of, and not in spite of, the Land League’s advocacy of non-violent action. But after the Pigott debacle who was ready to make capital ...”

“... well known that the much more authoritative Rampersad (the author of books on Langston Hughes and Richard Wright) had been at work for several years on a definitive biography. Rampersad had signed an agreement with Fanny Ellison and her lawyers that gave him full access to the Ellison papers. Jackson had only partial access. When a young professor publishes a ...”

“... blue. There are avenues of potential trees, future forests. Docklands is a garden city, clean, broad-avenued, free of traffic and peopled entirely by vibrant ink-spots. But the 19th-century colourists, busy with windmills, with miniature orchards on the Isle of Dogs, golden sandbanks at the mouth of the River Lea and deepwater docks of a celestial ...”

“... are the Wrong Notebooks. The same could be said of the Diaries of Emma published in facsimile by Richard Taylor, and containing memoranda of four holidays the Hardys took abroad, starting with their honeymoon. When Emma died in 1912 Hardy read not only the haunting Some Recollections describing her childhood and the Cornish romance with her husband but what ...”

“... to present them as heroically English, and when he calls Eden the ‘happy garden’ he is echoing Richard II, set on the brink of an earlier civil war. In his famous speech, the dying John of Gaunt calls England This other Eden, demi-paradise, This fortress built by nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war, This happy breed of men ...”

“... itself. As Primo Levi wrote, ‘it happened, therefore it can happen again.’Are​ we, as Richard Seymour suggests, ‘in the early days of a new fascism’? In Disaster Nationalism, Seymour argues that in trying to understand the new far right, we have been looking in the wrong places. Parties and policy platforms, or the personalities of ...”

“... bulldog’, the Oxford emeritus professor for the public understanding of science, Richard Dawkins, has been called his unmuzzled rottweiler; according to Dawkins, Darwin’s idea wasn’t just a great one (‘the most powerful, revolutionary idea ever put forward by an individual’), it is essentially the only idea you need to explain life ...”

“... all be going to hell. That’ll answer them. Herbert has influenced poets from Henry Vaughan and Richard Crashaw to Dylan Thomas and Geoffrey Hill. And not only poets; reading Herbert has made converts, even in modern times. While reciting ‘Love (III)’, the famous last poem in The Temple, Simone Weil felt that ‘Christ himself descended and took ...”

“... so much of Britten’s most powerful music is associated with texts and dramas treating the same broad area of psychological concern. A pattern establishes itself, and patterns demand explanation. Noticing that Britten’s major operas are pre-dominantly about the abuse of children or young men by adults (and, to some extent, the seduction of adults by young ...”

“... He was mad, but he was not just mad. There is more to know. This is the historical lacuna that Richard Noll exploits in his disturbing and often illuminating book. Noll comes to the quest for the historical Jung – his phrase – with a broad background in Jungianism, psychiatry and shamanism and his training stands him ...”

“... a fraction of the fraudulent stuff then on the market – was burned at the Excise Office Yard off Broad Street. Newspapers reported that ‘the city for nearly half a mile round was scented by the smell arising from the burning piles of sloe and other leaves forming the British tea.’ The ongoing scandal of what was really in British tea made space for ...”

“... had embraced Joyce. He thought of himself as a popular novelist, writing for a well-educated but broad audience. Graham Greene was the reader for Longmans who recommended publication of At Swim-Two-Birds and O’Nolan was ambitious for a Greene-sized readership. He sent a copy of his first novel to the popular novelist Ethel Mannin and ...”