“... to attend radical meetings. The most important moment in his development came when he encountered Thomas Spence in 1813, at the height of the popularity of Spencean thought. Spence, who was born in 1750 and witnessed the harsh effects of the Enclosure Acts – which turned common land into private property – was against landownership and landlords ...”

“... show several points of similarity with Smith’s: the two did not quarrel, but he was to have more to do with Cockburn’s friend Jeffrey, editor of the Review. Jeffrey’s cockiness and scepticism were chided and parodied: ‘Damn the solar system! bad light – planets too distant – pestered with comets – feeble contrivance; – could make a better ...”

“... threatened by sinister forces. ‘American Poetry’ is seen as the big, bad colonial influence by more than half the 35 contributors, few of whom bother to make it clear whether they mean Robert Lowell, or Allen Ginsberg, or the Black Mountain imitators of William Carlos Williams. ‘The Liverpool Poets’ are regarded with a mixture of fear and ...”

“... wielding a shotgun. Over time, as she divorced Tony Snowdon, took up with Roddy Llewellyn, drank more, smoked even more and put on weight, she became a figure of camp fun, a caricature that took on a life of its own after her death in 2002. Craig Brown’s Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret, a witty ...”

“... The​ New Yale Book of Quotations gives you a snippet of more or less everything. There are lines from poets and pop stars and politicians and philosophers, as well as words ascribed to people with jobs that don’t begin with ‘p’, such as film stars and novelists and historians. It includes some proverbs, nursery rhymes, advertising slogans and a category called ‘sayings’, for example, ‘Kilroy was here’ (learnedly traced to the Kearns Air Force Post Review of 1945) and ‘get a life’ (which it’s hard to believe wasn’t used before the Washington Post of 23 January 1983 ...”

“... but judges have built their professional lives on resisting such amnesia, and Lord Hutton is more judge-like than most. ‘The circumstances surrounding the death of Dr David Kelly’ included ‘Mr Andrew Gilligan’s broadcasts on the BBC Today programme on 29 May 2003’ since these had ‘closely involved Dr Kelly’ because they had alleged ...”

“... For more than forty years, starting with the publication of Ryle’s very influential The Concept of Mind in 1949, some of the best of the analytic philosophers have devoted themselves to the question of whether we can find a satisfactory substitute for what Ryle sneeringly called ‘the ghost in the machine’ – Descartes’s picture of human beings as divided into a material body and an immaterial mind ...”

“... Few things are harder to write than a sincere treatment in the style of ‘more sorrow than anger’. The sincerity is bound to get in the way of both the sorrow and the anger, and vice versa. One will be suspected, perhaps, of masking (beneath the regret) a covert relish. The fulsome style of the obituarist may creep in, causing one to be sanctimonious about the virtues in order to appear generous about the backslidings ...”

“... but then so are other things about MacDiarmid’s Synthetic Scots and Caledonian Antisyzygy. More than once he was accused of dictionary-grubbing: the drunk man looking at a thistle speaks under the influence of Jamieson’s – the dictionary, not the Scotch. There’s disingenuousness also in that Whitmanesque world-embrace: like most poets who wrote ...”

“... as an end in itself’ – which he rejects as ‘mere literary vanity’. It must be something more weighty, ‘for, in reality, no man can today be a writer, a Dichter, if he does not seriously doubt his right to be one’; and Canetti goes on to quote an anonymous diarist (it may have been the Berlin poet Oskar Loerke) who wrote ten days before the ...”

“... overland by taking a bus that had dropped off refugees in Krakow and was heading back to pick up more. There were few passengers, almost all of them men. We travelled in silence and it was night by the time we reached the border. The last building on the Polish side was a lonely-looking single-storey building with a sign that read ‘Motel Panorama’. On ...”

“... Bentivegna’s comrades opened fire and hurled grenades, then fled through the backstreets. More than thirty SS men were killed and dozens were injured.In no other Nazi-occupied city had partisans succeeded in such an audacious attack. Rome’s Gestapo chief, Herbert Kappler, was ordered to execute civilians at the rate of ten for every German killed ...”

“... the two enemy brothers, while in The Pinch Runner Memorandum, a galloping and comic nightmare more reminiscent of Lem’s Futurological Congress than of anything in Philip K. Dick, the father and son actually change places (it might have been called ‘The Switchover’), the former becoming a teenager while the latter assumes the advanced age of the ...”

“... discussion of Donne, Milton, Dryden, Swift and Pope over at least two centuries. This is all the more amazing given that its own life began effectively with a commercial problem. In 1777 the Scottish printer John Bell was flooding the London market with cheap editions of English poets, in defiance of the copyright interests of English publishers. A ...”

“... didn’t realise what Nazism was like. Some blamed his second wife, Marie, who was certainly more active in Nasjonal Samling (i.e. Nazi) circles than he was. Or maybe it was in part a pretence; a guise he assumed to enable him to use his influence to save at least some resisters from execution. It was also argued – and still is – that none of this ...”