“... and found it a ‘sombre bore’, its plot ‘puerile’. His attitude to painting was a little more responsive: he admired (and knew) Lautrec, and approved of Renoir; but he found Cézanne barbarous and Monet’s waterlilies ‘girly’. This was less philistinism than a robust admission of his own areas of non-response. And he did write one wonderful ...”

“... could one know that this was the way people wanted to live; rather than, say, the life they’d more or less unwillingly adapted to? Looking out of the car window, I would have had to conclude that a great number of people want to spend much of their time driving in and out of Birmingham on a badly designed racetrack bordered by establishments that will fit ...”

“... matter of Pushkin, Emily Brontë Is the best analogy in some ways Among our poets. But Pushkin is more various than Brontë, apparently, more resourceful in relation to the wider circuit of experience available to him. Poetry for Pushkin was a means of circumventing the spleen. Unforcedly assenting to each experience as a ...”

“... he had seen William’s future bride. Another version attributes the discovery to the philosopher Thomas Davidson, who invited his friend to meet ‘the woman you ought to marry’. It may not be clear who saw her first, but everyone seems to have agreed that Alice Howe Gibbens was destined for William James. Having followed up the proffered advice, William ...”

“... the Euphrates’, the actual kingdom of Judah, from which the term ‘Jew’ derives, was never more than a hilltop duchy some thirty miles across. Yet today it is the coastal plain, formerly the haunt of the Philistines, that is in the hands of the Zionists, and Judah for the most part is in the hands of the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. So what ...”

“... society.Since 2008, economists’ and politicians’ view of higher education has grown steadily more disapproving. In contrast to the boom years of the 1990s, when it seemed a virtuous circle might be established between generous public investment in universities and economic growth, the suspicion now is that individual academics aren’t sufficiently ...”

“... As we close in on the centenary of Basil Bunting’s birth at Scotswood-on-Tyne in 1900 it looks more and more as if this long poem written late in his life is not simply the best thing that Bunting had done but among the very best poems anyone has done this century. The Poet as Spy is the first full-length biography of ...”

“... An unredacted part of Cullather’s book records that the coup was thought to be both ‘more ambitious and more thoroughly successful’ than Iran 1953, about which the Iran operation chief officer found John Foster Dulles ‘almost alarmingly enthusiastic’. Guatemala 1954 went down in CIA lore as proof that ...”

“... ephemeral. Ammons listens to syllables as though he were diagnosing the workings of matter. ‘Sir Thomas Browne uses the word as “fictile vessels”, meaning clay,’ he wrote to a friend in 1954, ‘very interesting word; the first syllable hard, the second oozing over into a thin oilyness.’ This slippage from solid to liquid is translated into analogous ...”

“... to trashing Labour. Three days later it was forced to admit that voters were, apparently, even more stupid than feared: Corbyn ‘offered some of the biggest electoral bribes in history, making lavish promises of non-existent cash to pensioners, the public sector and those on the minimum wage. And he bribed the gullible young by pledging to scrap tuition ...”

“... MacArthur has handed out some $3 billion (at current values) to 588 American geniuses. Many times more than the total distributed by the Arts Council, British Academy and Leverhulme Foundation combined. The annual list is as eagerly awaited as the Nobel Prizes, the National Book Awards or (in the academic community, at least) the Oscars. Decisions are made by ...”

“... thought it unlikely that all men were created equal. His earliest compositions were conservative, more in line with the contrapuntal style of Brahms than the harmonic invention of Wagner. His first string quartet, performed by the Wiener Tonkünstlerverein thanks to Zemlinsky, who was on the committee, was well received: one influential critic, excited by his ...”

“... first met Johnson in 1763, in the back parlour of a bookshop. It belonged to a friend of Johnson, Thomas Davies, who described ‘his aweful approach … somewhat in the manner of an actor in the part of Horatio, when he addresses Hamlet on the appearance of his father’s ghost, “Look, my Lord, it comes.”’ ‘Remember me’ was Boswell’s mandate from ...”

“... a crass promotion for the Armani empire? (‘Life is promotion,’ the Guggenheim’s director, Thomas Krens, has cheerfully noted.) Arranged by colour and genre rather than chronologically, the four hundred garments cover the phases and influences of Armani’s career over the past twenty-five years, emphasising androgyny, minimalism, cinema, sensuality ...”

“... trouble is,’ Willard adds, ‘I had been back there, and I knew it just didn’t exist any more.’ The phrase picks up old slogans from Thomas Wolfe (‘You can’t go home again’) and Scott Fitzgerald (‘“Can’t repeat the past?” he cried, incredulously. “Why, of course you can”’), but it also adds ...”