“... moving in any direction’. He called one of his long sequences ‘Liquid Mercury’. ‘Any word may be as beautiful as water so long as it is free of restraints,’ he wrote. In an interview with the translator Simon Patton, he said: I thought the important thing about language at that time was not to change its form, not a question of how you used it ...”

“... themselves out of business: why go off to live at the edge of a pond, like Thoreau, when you may as well explore the relation of human sociability to nature over a book on the subject, or a lavish transformation of raw into cooked? (It’s also noticeable that nature writing hasn’t caught on there as it has in the UK: in France writing is still first ...”

“... The day he first met Wyndham Lewis, shortly after the end of the First World War, Ernest Hemingway was teaching Ezra Pound how to box. The encounter took place in Paris, where Pound had a studio, and Lewis, impassive beneath his trademark wide black hat, seemed content to watch in silence. ‘Ezra had not been boxing very long and I was embarrassed at having him work in front of anyone he knew, and I tried to make him look as good as possible,’ Hemingway wrote ...”

“... precise verses of yearning and revelation that he published in slim volumes. He was 34 when, in May 1914, he stood up to speak at the Zurichsee Doctors’ Society. Everyone was looking in the wrong place, he said. The cause of the conditions was not a germ or genetic defect, but something missing. Not an agent, but an absence.Touch​ your neck, just above ...”

“... contradictory attitudes derive from a common source and are interdependent, whereas mixed feelings may be based on a realistic assessment of the imperfect nature of the object.’ Love and hate – a too simple vocabulary, and so never quite the right names – are the common source, the elemental feelings with which we apprehend the world; they are ...”

“... announcement on the editorial tannoy, ‘There is another version of these lines in T.MS, which may not be quoted,’ and rejoice that the College has, as Ricks puts it, ‘chosen one form of piety over another’. The remark shows something like superhuman restraint when you consider that the ban was lifted later in the same year that his edition was ...”

“... of the lyric etc. The novel is in that sense always ‘lawless’, as Gide liked to say, and we may have to raise some questions when someone like Henry James comes along and offers to codify its new ‘laws’ in doctrines like ‘point of view’. Even though he is virtually absent from this book, for reasons I will come to, Faulkner offered his own ...”

“... The British Army occupied Jerusalem on Sunday, 9 December 1917, and withdrew on 14 May 1948. During its brief imperium in the Promised Land, Britain kept the promise made in 1917 by its Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour, in the Declaration that bears his name, ‘to favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people ...”

“... always another step worth taking away from the well-turned ornament. ‘Memory’ is undated. It may have been written before the ‘Last Poems’ of 1872, sometimes known as ‘New Poems’ or ‘Songs’, but this is where it has come to rest in the running order. It is a difficult, unaccommodating poem, despite the impartial courtesies of the 12-syllable ...”

“... walk. When we want to turn back the clock we are not giving up on time. Turning back, in short, may involve reconsideration; giving up suggests abandonment (and if we really give up there is no turning back). Both are reversals of a kind, expressions of doubt about progress and desire, or at least about direction and purpose. So it is essentially an anxiety ...”

“... Philip Carteret Webb. The Jewish Naturalisation Act (the ‘Jew Bill’) was finally passed in May 1753, but during the general election of the following year it became a focus for City, High Church and Tory opposition. ‘Here, for the first time in English history,’ Dr Alderman writes, ‘the spectre was raised, and the possibility (however remote or ...”

“... Assistant Lecturer in Classics at Birmingham University he made lifelong friends of E.R. Dodds and Ernest Stahl, but evidently had mixed feelings about teaching and perhaps about provincial living: ‘Qu’allais-je faire dans cette galère?’ He was not the first Protestant Ulsterman to seem frugal of speech and déraciné. Perhaps his difficulties were ...”

“... about booming and book wars. ‘So,’ Ford remarks, ‘if one can keep oneself out of it, one may present a picture of a sort of world and time.’ He never did keep himself out of the picture, of course, and never meant to. The autobiography in Return to Yesterday often amounts to little more than local colour. Ford ...”

“... though rendered ironic by the inadequacy of the protagonists. However ‘typical’ Emma may or may not be, the patterns of behaviour she is trapped in are recognisably similar to her creator’s. Flaubert had to make life difficult for himself. After the triumph of Madame Bovary, he was determined not to be seen ...”

“... Cameroon a ‘mini-Africa’. The insurgency dragged on until 1971 when the last of the leaders, Ernest Ouandié, was publicly executed. It seems that Ouandié had been on the run for days, hiding in banana plantations and under bridges. Exhausted and disoriented, he asked a passerby for help. The man recognised him and led him towards a nearby ...”