“... with the authority of the Apostle Bartholomew.’ Others thought the Buddha a decayed memory of Thomas the Apostle, who was said to have gone to India after the Resurrection. Some assumed the Buddhists were a branch of the Nestorian Christians who, exiled from Constantinople in the fifth century, had fled to Persia and later flourished in Tang Dynasty China ...”

“... of herself as much as de la Mare when she wrote admiringly that he had ‘evaded some of the more perilous reefs of literary criticism’ and had done so in part by suggesting ‘elements of religious allegory’ in his work, ‘which is as good as putting up a “No Trespassers” sign’. As well as a refuge from cant, the Middle Ages offered her a ...”

“... for favour – ‘broken/By wealth and poverty, torn between strength and weakness’. The more fulsome his praise and the more convoluted his metaphors, the more bitterly the speaker is protesting his condition of dependence. But the poem also mines empire’s inverse logic: its ...”

“... schmoozed Buckingham. In London there were two men – the architect Inigo Jones and the collector Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel – who could claim to be authorities when it came to art in Italy, but on the ground there they had to deal, as did Charles, with the piratical broker Daniel Nijs. Nijs pounced on the Gonzagas of Mantua when they happened to be ...”

“... Of the eight books she has published in Italy, translation has been haphazard, UK publication even more so. Her first two books remain untranslated; The Water Statues, her third – the one with Beeklam in it – first came out in 1980. Sweet Days of Discipline came next, then a short story collection in 1998, Proleterka (2001), These Possible Lives (2009) and ...”

“... picture of the tensions within contemporary philosophy is not altogether wrong. But a more detailed account of the history of philosophy in the 20th century would distinguish between a first, scientistic, phase of analytic philosophy and a second, anti-scientistic, phase. Between 1900 and 1960 most admirers of Frege would have agreed with ...”

“... of a love affair:I’m breaking it all down. The ticket was $600 and then after that there was more for the hotel and food and so on, for just ten days. Say $80 a day, no, more like $100 a day. And we made love, say, once a day on the average. That’s $100 a shot. And each time it lasted maybe two or three hours so that ...”

“... years before the Battle of Waterloo. As a teenager, through the influence of his elder brother, Thomas, himself a gifted artist and architect, Paul Sandby was taken on as a military draftsman for the Board of Ordnance, producing reliable maps for use in the subjugation of the Highlands. By the time of his death, his astonishing industry had earned him many ...”

“... conscience. The Book of Daniel is a sympathetic account of the Rosenberg martyrs (or spies, as a more commonly received idea has it). Ragtime concentrated its attack on the Morgan, Ford, Frick band of capitalist robber barons. Thirdly, there is the populist. Doctorow has yearned to enlarge the constituency of novel-readership. He desires, as he once put it ...”

“... was sent after the school in Brisbane. Porter’s early published poems, which were preceded by more than 500 unpublished ones, reveal a poet fusing Auden (not least his sense of the fascistic public school) with his own Australian background and his situation as an immigrant fascinated by London. In ‘Annotations of Auschwitz’ we hear of ‘lives ...”

“... wanderlad’, ‘liddel oud oddity’, ‘loose carollaries’, ‘Lewd’s carol’ and much more, including anagrams and reversed spellings. Here is a more extended reference: ‘Though Wonderlawn’s lost us for ever. Alis, alas, she broke the glass! Liddell looker through the leafery, ours is mistery of pain.’ The ...”

“... it finished; the middle movement forte in D major is very stupid, and the whole modulations savour more of counterpoint than of train oil and seagulls and salt fish – and it ought to be exactly the reverse.’ Todd does resist, with the result that his Mendelssohn is the stuffy, spoiled, Prince Charles-ish stereotype of aloofness that I’m sure he’s ...”

“... and they enjoyed discussing which characters they admired and loathed.One novel gripped them more than all the rest: Richardson’s gigantic Clarissa, published serially (with agonising gaps) between December 1747 and December 1748. At the end of Vol. IV, published in April 1748, Clarissa is left perilously ignorant of the fact that her villainous ...”

“... took this as evidence of supernatural forces. The faltering anabasis towards knowledge is all the more uncertain when the knowledge pursued is knowledge of the self. But the little tricks our minds play on us have proved to be fine doors into the way our minds work. Why, asked the 19th-century German physician Hermann von Helmholtz, do we see coloured ...”

“... by his fervently anti-communist adviser on counterinsurgency, Walt Whitman Rostow), Kennedy spoke more explicitly of wars of liberation being waged in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and called for ‘a whole new kind of strategy, a wholly different kind of force, and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training’.After 1961, US special ...”