“... of farming out the office to substitutes at a profit. London was no longer infested by unbeneficed young preachers living on their grubby wits. The Morning Post had ceased to be edited by a gang of ‘parsonical banditti’ ever ready to fight duels in Hyde Park. Hunting parsons, shooting parsons and wrestling parsons were becoming figures of the past. To be ...”

“... the celestial sphere. Here is the partly divine Gilgamesh, hero of the earliest poem extant, in Andrew George’s translation: Eleven cubits was his height, Four cubits his chest, from nipple to nipple. A triple cubit his feet and a rod his stride, A triple cubit the beard of his cheek. When Polyphemus rails against Odysseus from the clifftop, Homer asks us ...”

“... feelings spread varies from species to species. A wolf or a wild dog suckles her pack-mate’s young, and, it is said, even human wolf-children. A sheep, on the other hand, defends herself against rearing others. Lambs run through the whole herd, and could easily steal milk if allowed to. But a ewe learns her own new-born’s smell as she licks off the ...”

“... Sir Peter, co-designer of the rather bland main stadium for the 2012 London Olympics. But he was a young adventurer back then, a founder of the archetypal 1960s and 1970s avant-garde architects’ collective Archigram, which came up with never built but influential schemes for futuristic ‘walking’ buildings and ‘plug-in’ cities. His 1970 living-room is ...”

“... had some of the self-arraigning qualities of old Presbyterian spiritual diaries and some Romantic young Werther posing, but disciplined by a vigilant sense of irony about his own emotions. Later in his life, he was to defend intelligent self-pity as the portal to true empathy with others.But he was alert to his lack of parents. Substitutes and metaphors ...”

“... in dinner jackets. Francesca is set in the Sixties and Colin Ferguson must be a contemporary of young Roger Scruton. It is tempting to turn the novel on its author as his testament on the necessity of lordolatrous conservatism. But Scruton is not that easily nailed. Francesca is written in an edgy enigmatic style, which borders on, but never quite ...”

“... good humour throughout’. It was no better in Sligo, or in Carlow, where the unhappy choice of Andrew J. Kettle as the Parnellite candidate provoked so vigorous a tattoo on the appropriate utensil at Parnell’s meetings as to turn his last campaign into a hideous skimmington. They hunted Mr Fox to a kill. His sudden death in October 1891, at the age of ...”

“... attitudes and determinations were present in Quartermaster-Sergeant Grieve of Salonika. The young Grieve describes himself as being in ‘mental spate’; his intellectual life is ‘a debating society’, and he tells Ogilvie: ‘I feel like a buried city.’ These letters sizzle with energy; they also show an anxious desire to impress and, at moments ...”

“... task should be so ridiculously easy: ‘One had to forget ... that this graceful, fragile, tender young woman with those eyes, that smile, those gardens and snows in the background, had been brought in a cattle car to an extermination camp and killed by an injection of phenol into the heart.’ Killing is simple and hard in Nabokov: child’s play and yet ...”

“... yes: fork-bending no. The question is not this simple, however. In the books by Dr Finucane, by Andrew Mackenzie and by Susan Blackmore, there are countless contemporary experiences of ‘psychic’ phenomena. They are all very carefully classified: out-of-the-body experiences, psychokinesis (the ability to move objects without physical contact or any known ...”

“... insouciant flair for self-promotion he displayed as a member of the Parisian avant-garde, but as Andrew Hussey makes clear in his critical biography, this is to overlook the extent to which lettrisme was driven by the experience of trauma. The fact that Isou rarely mentioned the Romanian Holocaust is only a measure of the impact it had. After the war, Isou ...”

“... smooth stuff.’Born in 1893, Long was one of nine children; his father ran a livestock farm. As a young man, he was variously described, Thomas Patterson writes, as ‘disputatious, officious, bossy, ornery, curious, energetic, impudent, eager, smart, a show-off, contemptuous of rules’ and, generally, as a ‘pesterance’. After working as a travelling ...”

“... It takes epic disasters to rouse their language to levels above the workmanlike. I except Andrew Greig, the Scottish poet who has gone on two Himalayan expeditions to write about them. If our touchstone (among living writers) is W.H. Murray, with his power of opening up a quiet, unremarkable hour in the mountains into layers and vistas of visionary ...”

“... at home with the kids all day, are struggling for punchlines: ‘I learned that I have two young children, which is really something to find out’ (Jimmy Kimmel); ‘my kids have already learned a valuable lesson: their dad is an idiot’ (Jimmy Fallon). Trevor Noah feels lucky not to have children.Chinese social media is now overwhelmed with ...”

“... to visit her father. Their relationship is strained. He shows her a photograph of herself as a young woman, standing in front of a pink house. She’s offended. It’s not me, she tells him. He’s certain that it is. They both stare at the photograph, furious. Later, she wonders if he’s right, if somehow she’s blocked the memory. In Ladivine (2013), a ...”