“... then had plenty of room in which to attack. Such at least are the kind of tales old Kaspar told little Wilhelmine and Peterkin in Southey’s ballad. Like Blenheim, Zama was a famous victory for someone or other. Tolstoy would have been sceptical, maintaining that no general ever had any control over a battle, in which determined and contingent factors ...”

“... size of travelling trunks. And we cough, my wife and I, to dislocate a sigh,   When the noisy little kids are in their bunks. The second complaint: unlike Ricks, Karlin doesn’t tell you when the poems were written or first published, so it’s hard to verify one’s sense of cultural changes from one year or decade to another. Without dates, many of ...”

“... One might say that his was either the maddest form of sanity or the sanest form of madness. Arthur Miller called him ‘the mad inventor of modern theatre’, in a useful oversimplification. Carl Larsson’s portrait of Strindberg, on the book jacket, essentially in sepia but with rosy lips and penetratingly blue eyes (‘the most beautiful sapphire ...”

“... books has very low stakes, even when, as in Winter, Smith lends the proceedings some tension with little lies, a secret identity and a reunion of estranged siblings. There is no plot to speak of in Autumn. There’s an old man, Daniel Gluck, 101 years old in 2016, living in a nursing home, where he’s visited by his former neighbour Elisabeth, an underpaid ...”

“... alarming glimpse of her sister-in-law’s ‘private thoughts’. It makes her ‘shudder a little’. The question of the ‘body linen’ is a practical one – Caroline is unwell with a fever, she wants a fresh nightdress – but it comes laden with spiritual meaning. Things not ordinarily spoken of in polite company turn out to have a surprising ...”

“... extent, on the evidence of her letters) of Apfeltorte under lashings of cream, was a then little-known child-analyst of Polish-Slovakian extraction named Melanie Klein. It was largely thanks to the efforts of Alix and her husband James in bringing Klein to the attention of the British Psycho-Analytical Society that she moved to London in 1926 after ...”

“... published not long ago, and is lucky enough to find it still wearing its jacket, one may learn a little more about the book’s purpose. The jacket bears the bold subtitle ‘The best witty, pithy statements from all time pertinent to people and life today’, a flourish which may have been dropped for reasons of modesty, or truthfulness, or both. From the ...”

“... In​ Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, Professor Challenger takes a party of adventurers to South America, where they discover a plateau filled with dinosaurs. The book’s lesser-known sequel, The Poison Belt, isn’t quite so thrilling, and not only because of the disappointing lack of dinosaurs. This time Challenger summons the same cast to Sussex, where he tells them that the Earth is passing through a ‘poison belt’ of ether ...”

“... suddenly, as if catastrophically. Finally, they can have the odd effect of explaining a lot and a little at the same time, which is to say that the insights are often so general as to appear at once momentous and obvious. If these objections are at all legitimate, why is Rancière embraced so fully, especially in the art world, where he is read avidly by ...”

“... praise lavished on Debussy’s delicate textures and timbres: ‘Why won’t he allow me just a little corner of his shade? … I don’t want to take any of his sun’). The second was Maurice Ravel, a stalwart champion of Satie, who in 1910 founded the Société musicale indépendante (SMI) in Paris as a counterblast to the stuffy conservatism of the ...”

“... Why do some people need it so much, a fix that becomes hard to do without? ‘What a vile little diary,’ wrote Katherine Mansfield on January 1915, ‘but I am determined to keep it this year.’ Bereavements and troubles made the ‘other’ in it infinitely precious, a release from the daily grind of consciousness, in which most people without the ...”

“... to fail to acquire French a great disappointment. His friendships with such as Lady Gregory and Arthur Symons offered him only limited access to either language. Despite his wretched start and these persistent incapacities, he became a remarkably well-read intellectual, with a passion for Nietzsche, for Plato and Neoplatonism, for learned Italian ...”

“... piling up on remainder tables, 1999 marked the appearance of Christopher Ricks’s successor to Arthur Quiller-Couch’s Oxford Book of English Verse, published a hundred years ago, revised in 1939, and followed in 1972 by Helen Gardner’s New Oxford Book; of the Longman Anthology of British Literature, a brashly devolutionary challenger to the Norton ...”

“... British Government chose to disregard in 1917. Some thirty years afterwards the English Zionist Arthur Koestler described the Balfour Declaration as ‘one of the most improbable documents of all times’, since in it ‘one nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third’. ‘Iimprobable’ the Balfour Declaration undoubtedly was, yet ...”