“... La Rochefoucauld Don Paterson and I were crossing the Wolfe Tone Bridge in Galway contemplating Thomas Crapper. This was at early o’clock in the morning on our way back from an awful curry at the only Indian restaurant open in Galway in the wee hours. The night was mild, and our thoughts drifted towards talk of Crapper as the air behind us burned with the ...”

“... a strong line over questions of definition and evaluation; and each contains much to applaud. Thomas Kinsella’s New Oxford Book goes right back to the beginning, to a rath in front of an oak wood singled out for comment by some anonymous poet of the sixth century, and cherished as a survival from an even more distant ...”

“... conflict; but in the context of Japanese Buddhism they have a different dimension. What is more, the resistance of the Japanese medical profession to the use of the Pill means that abortion is for many Japanese women the ordinary means of birth control. This suits not only the doctors who perform the operation, but also the Buddhist clergy, who offer ...”

“... also in the Faber book: Fall – fall: dark, garrulous rumour, Until I could listen no more. Could listen no more – for beauty with sorrow Is a burden hard to be borne; The evening light on the foam, and the swan, there; The music, remote, forlorn. But there is no competition in such an acknowledgment. A few ...”

“... to sense shame, according to Freud and Lacan, is to be human, is Kafka’s narrator paradoxically more humanlike than the dogs mimicking humans?’ Furthermore, ‘observing the disgrace of another can cause shame in oneself: hence the narrator’s bodily affect of shame when confronted with the dancing dogs is to make himself smaller and to ...”

“... Bennett, required to audition for the John Betjeman slot, couldn’t bring himself to deliver much more than formulaic world-weariness, a drone like a miraculously articulate David Hockney impersonator. Jonathan Meades does this schtick so much better, performs himself with lip-smacking relish. Gossip has its charms, but not when it’s dragged out over three ...”

“... has some things in common with right-wing demagogues of the past, but Snyder neglects the next, more difficult step: explaining how Trump, and the context in which he arose, is different. The new president did not come to power thanks to the collapse of a liberal Weimar-like regime, but rather after a quarter of a century of domestic liberal triumph and ...”

“... in terms of material substrates, it’s been asked ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ – though Thomas Nagel’s famous essay of 1974 wasn’t really about the consciousness or sensory world of bats but about the consciousness and sensibilities of reductionist philosophers. (Nagel’s answer: we don’t know, and we certainly aren’t on the way to knowing ...”

“... then the last time I went to the Villa Farnese at Caprarola, seven miles away, there were more people working in the ticket office than there were tourists, even though it’s one of the most magnificent secular buildings in Italy).Much the most interesting thing about Santa Maria di Falleri, however, is what lies beneath. The track leading to the ...”

“... of the church clerks whom they seemed to disdain. Professor Barlow’s sterling new biography of Thomas Becket shows us a man whose origins, like William’s, were not of the highest: his father ‘may have been in textiles’. Like William, Thomas owed his rise, not to inheritance, but to his being sent to the household ...”

“... as a sign of the philosopher’s madness. Erasmus offers two suggestions, less eschatological, more psychologically and indeed physiologically informed than that of Socrates. ‘Is death as horrible a thing as it’s commonly asserted to be?’ asks Marcolphus the naive character, in one of the Colloquies. No, says Phaedrus, the voice of wisdom: ‘If a ...”

“... and nourished with intellectual fodder. ‘Those who wish to revive the West,’ concludes Mr Thomas, ‘should recognise that one of the benefits of a study of history is that it is always possible to reverse, as Plato put it, an apparently fatal tendency towards decay, however late the hour …’ The weight of our planet’s unfinished history ...”

“... Once more upon the waters! yet once more! And the waves bound beneath me as a steed That knows his rider.On 25 April 1816, Byron set out from Dover for the Continent, never to return to England. Four days earlier, he had signed the separation papers that put an end to what Benita Eisler calls ‘one of the most infamously wretched marriages in history ...”

“... to make their own lives easier, at the cost, no doubt, of making the lives of certain authors more exasperating. They are dangerous terms because they tempt us to lump writers like Muriel Spark and Alice Thomas Ellis together, especially when there are other alluring points of comparison, such as a characteristic tone ...”

“... was increasingly recognised as a challenging alternative to the traditions of the West. An even more sensitive frontier is explored in Reich-Ranicki’s study of the role of Jews in German literature, Uber Ruhestörer (1973). In this short collection of lectures and reviews, Jewish writers from Heine to Jurek Becker are assigned the function of ...”