“... pay the costly price of sons and lovers’. In Waldo, he had ‘lost a beautiful estate, – no more. I cannot get it nearer to me.’ His fading agony was a frustration. He had lost his loss, which ‘leaves no scar. It was caducous. I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature.’ Emerson wanted readers to stumble over ...”

“... The hyper-courtly​ Sir Thomas Wyatt wrote a verse satire in the mid-1530s that begins: ‘My mother’s maids, when they did sew and spin,/They sang sometime a song of the field mouse.’ Wyatt goes on to relate the song, which is pretty much the story of the town mouse and the country mouse as told by Horace in his Satires with some added shivers of late Henrician courtly horror ...”

“... in 1982’. But why ‘supposedly’? Was it not possible that the Israeli invasion, which cost more than 17 thousand lives (most of them civilians), should have produced just such violent acts of revenge against Israel’s principal ally? Bradlee says that Israel’s policy against ‘terrorists’ – a policy with which North, of course, thoroughly ...”

“... a celebration of hip and chaotic capitalism. It is written in the regulation giddy style that Thomas Frank and the Baffler school in Chicago have dissected so well. Once again we are presented with the lives of the saints of middle management, Leadbeater’s magnificent pilgrims are full of daring. They struggle for personal fulfilment and venture ...”

“... in Nicaragua, is also a priest, and at one stage spent two years training as a Trappist with Thomas Merton. He abandoned that road and created a community on an island in the vast Lake of Nicaragua where he wrote some of his greatest and most deeply revolutionary poetry. Eventually, he was compelled to abandon his contemplative, artistic protest and join ...”

“... on Theresienstadt, who claimed that Eichmann himself had made these individual selections. Even more important, the prosecution’s general picture of a clear-cut division between persecutors and victims would have suffered greatly. Arendt’s point is that no prosecution would have wanted, and no defence would have dared, to address the forced ...”

“... in the presidential elections of the 1920s. In 1924, the party’s nominating convention required more than a hundred rounds of voting even to agree on a presidential candidate. Then, with the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, there was a remarkable reversal of fortunes. For decades afterwards, the party almost always controlled Congress and the ...”

“... bayed most insistently for blood in the prelude to the Iraq War – the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman demanded that France be voted ‘Off the Island’ (i.e. out of the Security Council) for its presumption in opposing America’s drive to war – are today the most confident when asserting their monopoly of insight into world affairs. The same ...”

“... she must give an account of her beliefs to a presiding jury. Against all likelihood, the book is more affecting than anything else he has written, and, I think, deeply confessional. Singer’s suggestion of evasion is unfair, at least by the time one has reached the remarkable expiration, like a dying breath, with which the book closes. Aristotle ...”

“... into the marsh and then returned for another load, in a cycle repeated many times over – ‘more than one thousand cartloads’, according to John Stow – before the carters could be paid and sent home. Afterwards, the area was covered over with ‘soylage of the citie’ … [T]he carts were filled with human remains … [which] had been lodged in the ...”

“... in western society of a direct knowledge of Greek and Latin, the need for translation became more palpable than at any time since the Middle Ages. Concomitantly, western aesthetic and political sensibility shifted to new horizons: to the cultures of Asia, in particular. Again, translation was the only mode of access. From the time of Browning and ...”

“... a hen harrier. Probably, like his uncle, he rode out in the early evenings – my father was much more confident on horseback than on his feet. Sometimes Geddes takes Bob out for the day, driving on what he calls his ‘village doctor’s’ rounds. Having heard that Germany is fighting for her life in the east, Geddes believes that ‘the second year of the ...”

“... the 1970s. An air of homely neglect hung over the broad avenues of large semis. In London there is more money than space, or time; here, it was the opposite. The Ellington and Hereson School is a set of shining white blocks built in 2007 as part of Labour’s PFI programme. As well as Farage, Charlie Leys, the sixth-former who had organised and was chairing ...”

“... by John Maxwell, or the vulgar publisher William Tinsley’s Tinsley’s Magazine, in which Thomas Hardy had his first success with the serial of A Pair of Blue Eyes. (Houghton’s explanation for not indexing these three journals is revealing: ‘they consist primarily of fiction, and fiction seems sufficiently represented.’) At times, the Index’s ...”

“... been disregarded or ignored by decision-makers.’ Despite President Johnson’s and, still more, President Nixon’s interest in covert action, neither of them – in Mr Laqueur’s view – thought very highly of the intelligence community. If secret intelligence has not had a greater influence on policy, it is at least partly because policymakers ...”