“... A sheep nibbling earth’s firstlings is my spirit that prays for the day Christ may stoop me as a cooper denies his timber’s nature – for two years in this windy eye of God I have wrestled and prayed against myself and you ask if I have the time for poems ... Your letter brought me tears, and I was grateful. Oppression, expression, these are words but lack the radish-bite of right words for two years in the flinty field of etymology ...”

“... The planet may have tilted, if only a hint when the shelf of cloud burnt angrily before dusk           jack-o’-lantern stuff her hair the colour of her coat, fallwear       ******* The wet stain her bathing-suit left on the bench           the shape of Bolivia, drying, drying into atol ...”

“... and never quite. But further, further still: even the painter must be destroyed in order that one may become the ...”

“... first conferred on her by a mad millenarian back in England in 1795 (when she was 19), and which may have fed into her messianic fantasies later on. In her defence, it is worth pointing out that she wasn’t blind – or not all the time – to the fact that these might be delusory. But, as she wrote to Meryon in 1818, ‘Here without any stir on my own ...”

“... of influential eccentrics such as Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault? Medical discourse may well, as Gill claims, have eroded tolerance of difference and deformity, and it may belong to the history of ‘attempts to define and police the parameters of acceptable diversity’. The scientific study of teratological ...”

“... in manuscript. In addition to line-by-line transcriptions which add to the bulk of the book and may not be much consulted, except by future editors (if one can imagine the need for them), there are some prayers of unsettled authorship, a dramatisation of part of Samuel Richardson’s novel Sir Charles Grandison, admittedly of little interest in itself, and ...”

“... about the colony’s harrowing fate. It was still early in the history of Athenian drama, and it may have been the audience’s reaction to Phrynicus’ play that led later tragedians to prefer mythological topics to contemporary ones. Herodotus tells us that the entire theatre fell to weeping and that Phrynicus was fined a thousand drachmae for reminding ...”

“... only apparent. Doing nothing – the lifelong ambition of Beckett’s characters, for example – may well be better than doing something, and is often philosophically more interesting. But being nobody cannot be a consummation to be wished. And before the bite there is a fine comic pathos in the sight of this invisible and unretainable man, a picture of a ...”

“... The clinical language used to describe the loss of pulse when the heart fails is not subtle. There may be ‘rapid haemodynamic deterioration’: the blood stops moving around the body. Presentation is with ‘dyspnoea, syncope or pain in the praecordium’ (the patient gasps for breath and collapses, feeling as if their chest is being torn apart). Many people ...”

“... we can imagine them holding their conversational own, over the capons and teal. What changed on 4 May 1557 was incorporation: a charter endorsed by Philip and Mary granted the Stationers a nationwide monopoly on printing, and the right to seize, burn or amend illegal books; to buy and sell property; to bring lawsuits in court; to gather whenever they ...”

“... see, what we have to deduce: Every landscape offers, at first glance, an immense disorder which may be sorted out howsoever we please. We may sketch out the history of its cultivation, plot the accidents of geography which have befallen it, and ponder the ups and downs of history and prehistory: but the most august of ...”

“... nothing to lose are as dangerous in their own way as those who lord it over them. It is this devil-may-care attitude we relish in Falstaff and Toby Belch, whose roguery is spiced by the fact that they are knights of the realm. They can knock around with the lower orders because hierarchy means nothing to those at the apex of it. It is the lower-middle-class ...”

“... on manufacturing jobs, on taking the fight to the terrorists, and on sharing the love at home. He may even be able to claim for a while that by offering something to each side of the partisan divide he is starting to bridge it. But all he will be doing is papering over the gaping cracks. Tax cuts coupled with unfunded government spending will fuel inflation ...”

“... sustained IRA violence has shifted Ulster unionist attitudes on this point. Indeed, it may have hardened unionist opposition still further. ETA had even less support in the Basque country for its secessionist aims. And no amount of Hamas terrorism is going to persuade the Israelis to dismantle their state. Al-Qaida thought it had some reason to ...”

“... claims in his essential new book, claiming that Rohingyas were in Arakan well before 1784, and may even have arrived there before the Buddhist Rakhine. Ibrahim offers a credible genealogy that links Rohingyas to Indo-Aryan groups who arrived from the Ganges Valley as early as 3000 bc. He also charts the evolution of their language and script, which has ...”