“... was 477 pages long. Depending on how the next volume pans out, the complete Life is going to be at least treble and possibly quadruple the size of your average biography of Auden, Eliot or Pound, and might even outdo the Bible, which was of course written by divers hands, over a 1500-year period, and may have been ...”

“... Water of Leith near Dean Parish Church and Cemetery, Edinburgh.’ I crossed back over the river by Dean Path and Bells Brae, to Queensferry Street then left at Hope and into Charlotte Square, the site of the Edinburgh Book Festival. Brian Parsons’s Committed to the Cleansing Flame chronicles a ritual shift coincident with the Industrial Revolution. Just ...”

“... his own boyhood tingle at the idea of ships and their Empire routes, especially long ocean voyages by P&O liner. Excitement, homesickness, the magic of the word ‘Orient’: to a child growing up in South-East England in the 1940s and 1950s, such elements blended early into a near-poetry of longing for a vertical sun. ...”

“... levels of the World Trade Center in 2001, songbirds had been in the habit of doing so, migrating by night and mistaking the lights high above the city for stars. At least one ornithologist used to stroll along the base of the towers in the early morning, removing small corpses and rescuing the living. A lot of species have been too fragile, too particular in ...”

“... they had a cautionary myth about it. The immortal rosy-fingered Eos, who is renewed each night by a therapeutic plunge into Okeanos, falls in love with the mortal Tithonos, abducts him, and bears him off to a life of everlasting love at the ends of the earth. But, like all fairytale victims, Eos gets the wish-formula wrong. Asking Zeus that her beloved ...”

“... described it as ‘“dangerous and unpleasant”, which was what it was intended to be’. By the same token, the first volume of his massive trilogy, Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England (1980-2001), begins by informing readers that the author’s mind is ...”

“... that surrounded his reputation both in his own day and afterwards, as reflected in the 1962 David Lean biopic, presenting him as the romantic hero – tall, blue-eyed, in flowing robes – he always wanted to be. His failures are familiar to anyone who has taken any serious interest in him, and were only too painfully ...”

“... beneficence and humanity … or whatever proceeds from a tender sympathy with others’ (David Hume). Fashionable poems deplored slavery and child labour, and wrung tears from the public on behalf of the distressed. Sterne assured his readers that his purpose in A Sentimental Journey (1768) ‘was to teach us to love the world and our fellow ...”

“... his age, with a ‘wide, sensuous mouth’, and has the details of the arrangement thrashed out by his accountant. He works for a swindler flogging groceries that are past their sell-by date, then sets up his own business selling filtered tap water as mineral water in stolen branded bottles. His company and profits ...”

“... Lawn’, the Irish Times column written, on and off, for almost a quarter of a century by Flann O’Brien (or, if you prefer, Myles na Gopaleen, or Brian O’Nolan). My favourite has always been the catechism of cliché. When things are few, what also are they? Far between. What are stocks of fuel doing when they are low? Running. How low are they ...”

“... to do so. And we don’t want to think of parents and children being in any way sexually gratified by their status in relation to each other. But, to put it as cutely as possible, feeling big always depends on someone else being made to feel small. When your child zooms round the house saying he’s a superhero you can either remind him that he’s actually a ...”

“... he published Venus and Adonis (1593) his early plays had revealed an imagination profoundly shaped by Ovid’s tales of the interaction between gods and mortals, and, despite the growing prevalence among his audiences of a neoclassical taste for satirical urban realism, throughout his career he scripted scenes in which Hymen personally ratifies the ending of a ...”

“... number’ – it’s the sum of its divisors, 3, 2 and 1 – and it’s favoured for that reason by Azarya Sheiner, a six-year-old mathematical genius who is the central attractor, but not the protagonist, of Rebecca Goldstein’s new novel, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God. Twenty-eight is the next perfect number (divisors 14, 7, 4, 2, 1), and 28 ...”

“... Christian values in highbrow journalism and popular fiction – even when they were racked by religious doubt. The ruling class ruled because it was clever, because it was well off, and because it hung together. It wore the old school tie, congregated in the Home Counties, kept skeletons in the cupboard and marriage in the family. It covered up Anthony ...”

“... McGurran couldn’t resist the opportunity: ‘How’s the stoppage going, Ian?’ Paisley – by all accounts far more jovial than his pulpit demeanour suggests – replied: ‘Well, you ought to know how hard it is to lead the working class, Malachy.’ The Official IRA emerged after the IRA split in 1969, soon after the Troubles began; the other, more ...”