“... music which is ‘perhaps, the misunderstood utterance of prayer’. It is erev Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, on New York’s Lower East Side and 13-year-old Jakie, son of Cantor and Sarah Rabinowitz, is to chant Kol Nidre in his father’s synagogue. Cut to Jakie performing ‘My Gal Sal’ in a local saloon. The cantor arrives, drags him home by his ...”

“... you could almost drink/To know how jewels taste’. She has sometimes been read as a latter-day Christina Rossetti, but attempts to place her in this lineage are a little strained, and in her poetry the word ‘heaven’ always arrives with a sense of let-down. The only thing Mew wants to be everlasting is transience; angels envy mortals rather than the ...”

“... demands right-wing concessions, especially as they pertain to refugees.Thanks to the journalist Robin Alexander’s Die Getriebenen: Merkel und die Flüchtlingspolitik (as yet untranslated, but something like ‘The Impelled: Merkel and Refugee Politics’), we now have a fine-grained account of Merkel’s decision to open the border in September ...”

“... but despite having a covetable job as Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford, Robin Collingwood disliked college life and despised academic forms of thought and writing, especially in philosophy. If the responsibilities attached to his job were performed expeditiously, it was only because he refused to give them a moment’s more attention ...”

“... food. City life was happening everywhere ... Flies get dizzy spells and bees have booze problems. Robin redbreasts hit the deck with psychosomatic ulcers and cholesterol overload. In the alleys, dogs are coughing their hearts out on snout and dope. The stooped flowers in their sodden beds endure backpinch and rug-loss, what with all the stress about. Even the ...”

“... when she was still very young, though already a wife and mother. It has been well translated by Robin Kemball. Tsvetaeva’s background was as much European as Russian. Her father was a distinguished and absent-minded professor (‘my attentively uncomprehending father’) who came from a family of Orthodox priests: but her mother, his second wife, was from ...”

“... the Mayor of Berlin that he mustn’t think too much about it – ‘these things happen every day in Iran.’) Gudrun Ensslin’s verdict on these events was both typical of what many young radicals felt and a manifesto for what was to come: This fascist state means to kill us all. We must organise resistance. Violence is the only way to answer ...”

“... they care for as the fox doth for the geese ... insomuch as they permit and suffer you to read Robin Hood, and Bevis of Hampton, Hercules, Hector and Troilus ... ribaldry, as filthy as heart can think.’ The positions of Tyndale and More were, it has often been pointed out, both poles apart and remarkably close. On social matters, they were often in ...”

“... Among the testimony of others (former nuns, social workers), we are given an account by Robin Fox, editor of the Lancet, written after a visit to Mother Teresa’s ‘operation’ in Calcutta. Dr Fox, although favourably disposed towards Mother Teresa’s work, found that medical facilities for the ill and the dying were not only woefully ...”

“... about him. One could be expelled from this club. The early death of Calder coincided almost to the day with that of Walker, Perkin as he was called – Wilson’s friend from Westminster days. Drabble seems to know all about him; her portrait convinced and surprised me. Here, it emerges, was a man given, like Wilson, to nightmares, to bouts of uncontrolled ...”

“... don’t marry their sisters, and mothers don’t cut their babies’ throats. Six years ago, when Robin Robertson translated Euripides’ Medea, he added an epigraph from a poem of Brecht’s: In the dark times will there also be singing? Yes there will also be singing About the dark times. Perhaps the singing of dark times is popular now because tragedies ...”

“... he failed to answer questions about the location of either al-Zawahiri (despite having met him the day before his capture) or bin Laden’s courier, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, the man who led the Americans to Abbotabad. Other detainees told the Americans that al-Kuwaiti had been well known to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed for years. So the waterboarding not only fed ...”

“... now have been a baronet and the owner of the large Tichborne estate in Hampshire. And on Christmas Day 1866 he arrived in London to claim his inheritance. It is hard to think of any respect in which the Claimant resembled Roger. He was already 13 and a half stone, in contrast to the wraithlike Roger, and was to reach massive proportions, 28 stone 4 lbs, by ...”

“... to name, with an influence extending far beyond the telephone kiosk. For some critics (such as Robin Middleton, in John Soane, Architect) Soane’s wholly unclassical handling of space makes his work the ultimate origin of architectural Modernism; others, stressing his playful pastiche of classical Order, see him instead as the fountainhead of ...”

“... wretch wilt thou let thy soule be tyde To Mens lawes, by which she shall not be tryed At the last day? Oh will it then serve thee To say a Philipp, or a Gregorie, A Harry, or a Martin tought me this? Is not this excuse for meere contrarys Equally stronge? cannot both sides say so? That thou mayst rightly obay power, her bounds know: Those past, her ...”