“... outlet at last in a venomous tirade; not for him the careful think-piece upon which a career may depend, or the glittering parade of witticisms, or the tessitura of erudite references. The night is too short and tomorrow already belongs to another review. What I like most about this companionable creature is his readiness, once his column inches have ...”

“... he paints, and Velasquez looks back at us through the eyes of a court dwarf. This self-involvement may all the more readily be found in literature since most poets tend to be experts on themselves. Outgoing and unegoistic as he was, Keats shows himself in his letters to be endlessly articulate on himself and his writing, and the poems, too, can be read as ...”

“... upon this follows ‘the thought of high windows’. Strong and terse as it is, ‘High Windows’ may not be one of Larkin’s very best poems. As happens elsewhere in his work, a juxtaposition of social caricature with sudden withdrawn reflection can make for difficulty. A manner of casual colloquiality does not necessarily produce a movement of thought that ...”

“... her Mansion House speech in March, in which she outlined her plans for leaving the EU, Theresa May stated that she ‘would not allow anything that would damage the integrity of our precious Union’. We have heard much about Brexit and ‘the will of the people’. Yet the people who voted in the 2016 referendum did not speak with one voice. They were ...”

“... might be as important as the analysis of the things which fill them. Headlines and illustrations may determine what is understood, and the cast of mind of a community may be better known through its response to ephemera than by the close investigation of its accepted classics. Bibliographers have been led by such ...”

“... this by saying that Luther was ‘no longer medieval, but neither had he become modern’. We may indeed see him in his later years of corpulent dogmatism as a whale washed up on the beach, stranded between two tides. He saw himself as a soldier fighting in a desperate if shadowy conflict between heaven and hell. He had no doubt, Oberman reminds us, of ...”

“... its importance more or less in direct proportion to the depth of the gloom it sheds. With luck we may one day look back on it as the last ‘English’ novel. It is the 1920s. Timothy Harcombe, the narrator, works with his father Clement, a faith-healer, at the Chemical Theatre in the City Road in London; his mother Cecilia died in giving him birth. Each ...”

“... the law of causality unites all the parts into a whole. This characteristically Japanese principle may seem more incidental, associational and irrational than its Western counterpart, so it is not surprising that Westerners often complain of meandering formlessness in Japanese novels, music, dance and theatre: but the Japanese in return find the implacable ...”

“... is that is causing the trouble – and we are never told – Jimmy is excluded from the chances it may afford to those seeking power and advantage. He is, in this sense, impotent. He has already insulted Jane sexually: now he and one of his youths kill her. Guerrillas strikes me as a powerful and accomplished work, but some readers were upset by the hostility ...”

“... to analyse conversations, or have something a little more interesting … HS: … as weird as it may be, there’s an area called the Analysis of Conversation. It’s done in various parts of the world and I invented it. So that if I tell you that what we’re doing is studying conversation then there is nowhere to turn … There is no way that conversation ...”

“... States, most politicians, artists, intellectuals, democracy, women’s suffrage and cricket. There may have been private reasons for this. Like many who hero-worship men of action, he may have felt uncomfortable with his own slight, dark-skinned (suspiciously so, some of his more unpleasant critics ...”

“... if not inevitabilities’ at the heart of organic evolution, and biological possibility may, because of ‘physical constraints, be much more limited than is usually supposed’. Conway Morris states early on that he wants to ‘reopen the portals’ to find ‘a metaphysic for evolution’. His new approach, which he hopes might ‘at last allow a ...”

“... today, I mean the date at the bottom of the page, not the day I’m writing this, or whenever you may be reading it. It’s more appropriate that way, since the man doesn’t exist, in public, other than on the printed page. He has only been photographed twice, both times against his will, in the forty years since his first novel, V., was published. A film ...”

“... They cannot, season by season, startle with new patterns of fur or feathers. People can.We may, snake-like, shed worn-out clothes; we may become bored, disgusted or embarrassed by the way we look. Or, better, we may decide to be inventive, emulative and playful. But whether new ...”

“... of transvestism as it is explored by these two Dutch historians. Yet, as Burke also notes, we may be able to learn quite a lot about the history of a society from the way otherwise obscure people perceived and constructed, and sometimes even tried to change, their sexual identity. By combing through a selection of Dutch archives of the 17th and 18th ...”