“... epiphanies, heard between two waves, in the ominous echo of an Indian cave, in the moment in the rose garden or in a sudden shout in the street, it can scarcely be claimed by the more conventionally religious that the Almighty’s own utterances are either less infrequent or less enigmatic. Literature as religion, however, is a project doomed to failure. For ...”

“... Dressing Room’, has his speaker remark: ‘Should I the Queen of Love refuse,/Because she rose from stinking Ooze?’ Or even Samuel Johnson. If women’s writing were taken into account, would it change the way we read and judge the poetry of an era long assumed to be magisterially Augustan and masculine? In her passionate and wide-ranging study of ...”

“... who did most to unmoor Western understandings of politics from Western understandings of God (what Mark Lilla nicely calls ‘the Great Separation’). Seen from this perspective, Hunt’s cursory treatment of Hobbes becomes somewhat less defensible. A final question that she prompts is why and how the idea of human rights appealed so powerfully and so deeply ...”

“... for an ever-lengthening extension of the charter.The two sieges of Namur are also thought to mark a novelty of a different sort: throughout the desperate and bloody fighting, the government encouraged public interest in and support for the war. The sieges were a media circus. It was the birth of war tourism. As Macaulay points out, there were plenty of ...”

“... including PE – can succeed in comprehensives (both Wilshaw and City’s original principal, Mark Emmerson, ran comprehensives in East London before becoming academy heads).Their supporters hope that the likes of Wilshaw have finally beaten back the tide of ‘progressive’ education methods that rose in the 1960s and ...”

“... come to Innsbruck as her daughter’s chaperone. Jelinek was already 22. This was the high-water mark in Austria’s radical postwar renaissance. Thomas Bernhard was the acknowledged leader of the dissident pack, with Peter Handke and the Forum Stadtpark group from Graz representing the next wave of an obligatory avant-garde. Jelinek was at the young end of ...”

“... guise of the travelling poet, he points up unfamiliar things in his new surroundings in order to mark his separation from them, yet when the poet of St Lucia speaks of his home, his language and cadence seem oddly to set him at a remove from the idiom of the island: The hospital is quiet in the rain. A naked boy drives pigs into the bush. The coast shudders ...”

“... The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl. After his death in 1916 his reputation rose steadily, buoyed by T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound in the 1920s and later by R.P. Blackmur and Lionel Trilling among other critics, who brought about the ‘James Revival’ which began in the 1940s and is still going strong. James did much in his lifetime to ...”

“... In the summer​ of 1935, when he was 18, Robert Lowell and two friends from St Mark’s School – Blair Clark and Frank Parker – rented a house in Nantucket. Under Lowell’s direction, they studied the Bible (with special attention to the Book of Job) and ate cereal with raw honey and ‘badly’ cooked eels ...”

“... There are wonderful allusive jokes here (‘There’s something rotten in the state of D-Mark’), but there is also a sense of doom: ‘My Judaism: what I still recognise among the ruins of my existence.’ Celan writes this phrase in French. And there are subtle remarks that connect his poetry to what he imagines poetry more generally to be.[Poetry ...”

“... best estimate of the amount of gold held by the Bank of England on a given future day. Circulation rose enormously because of canny publicity, and because entrants had to find five witnesses for their guess. Harmsworth was the one who made real money from the competition: the winner died of TB eight years later. He branched out into new publications, notably ...”

“... cavity reeking of ‘refrigerated meat, human shit and the blended penny tang of blood’, Lara-Rose Iredale of St Thomas’s Hospital puts everything back together with needle and thread, gives the body an antibacterial sponge bath, and washes the hair in Alberto Balsam Sweet Strawberry. The brain stays out. Campbell holds one, marvelling at the ...”

“... hopeless endeavour. No one would buy it, hardly anyone would admire it: the painting would merely mark another stage in his descent into neglect and debt. On 22 June, in front of his vast unfinished canvas in the sweltering studio, he shot himself and then cut his throat. At the inquest the coroner’s summing-up dwelt chiefly on Sir Robert Peel’s ...”

“... more than all’, especially of a non-commodity, a ‘nothing’ like time. One’s mental hair rose at this treatment. After all, Mme de Maintenon didn’t mean time but herself, her thoughts, her actions. But then Derrida acknowledged this objection and asked us to go along with his interpretation. How could one not assent to so gentle a request by a ...”

“... he noticed a vocal score of a very recently published opera. As though drawn by a magnet, he rose and took the volume from the shelf, sat down at the piano, opened it, and began to play. It was the ‘Good Night’ scene from Benjamin Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia ... Ten years after Lenny’s visit to our home West Side Story excited the musical ...”