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“... before. For the most radical among them, ‘the poorest he that is in England’, in Thomas Rainsborough’s famous phrase, had the same rights as the greatest. This is not to say that the Levellers were united in their commitment to a democratic franchise. Certain categories of men would have been excluded from the start (and women excluded ...”

“... in Comyns’s work, as do children who are neglected, abused, endowed with supernatural powers, disruptive, imaginative and periodically violent. ‘See stars, Mummy,’ Sandro says before hitting Sophia over the head with an iron bar. It is this intertwining of fact and fiction, realism and surrealism, that gives Comyns’s work its power. Six of ...”

“... know, or think they know, most of the answers. In this sense, Barnes both celebrates and mocks the powers of reason. He shows us Intelligence in overdrive, but he also requires us to wonder if it’s chosen the right road. Asking questions is supposed to be a ‘good thing’, to do with being neither fooled nor squashed. But is it not also an affliction, a ...”

“... it flourished in the United States well into the 1920s. In 1891 the eminent British surgeon, Thomas Spencer Wells, expressed his outrage at this state of affairs in images which no contemporary feminist could have bettered. He denounced the ‘gynaecological proletarians’ who performed ovariotomies on unscientific and frivolous grounds: ‘If we hold ...”

“... has undermined the assumption that British is best. The undignified interrogation of Clarence Thomas may not have done much to enhance his personal standing or that of the institution that he now serves. But it helped to remind us that there is such a place as the United States Supreme Court, and that it seems to matter desperately to a great many people ...”

“... life.’ The eventual irony is that her investigation decides nothing and is actually thwarted by powers outside her control: the supposed agent of organisation and authority, sent to expose the Catchprices’ flailing hopelessness, turns out to be equally at the mercy of circumstance. We get an early hint of this when Maria finds herself attracted to Jack ...”

“... impressed by Harrington’s acknowledgment of his debt to that profound enemy of republicanism, Thomas Hobbes, and to have noticed the purposes which, for all their obvious disagreements, Hobbes and Harrington shared. Hobbes is the subject of two strong essays. Quentin Skinner follows the erratic development of his attitude to the Classical tradition which ...”

“... though for different reasons. His intricate manoeuvres to secure the Presidency after Thomas Garrigue Masaryk’s resignation in 1935 inevitably won him many enemies. As foreign minister from 1918, his unwillingness to continue to let Czechoslovaks participate in the intervention against Soviet Russia had infuriated conservatives such as Karel ...”

“... Bruno Schulz was not Dante. Nor was he another Kafka (a writer whom he greatly admired). No Thomas Aquinas stood behind Schulz’s infernos and glimpses of paradise; nor is there in his work any notion of an inaccessible Law of the kind Kafka invoked with unappeasable irony. What Schulz did share with Kafka was a Father Problem. His father, like ...”

“... dimension. As a boy, Richard has met a portentous, learned stranger, Broderick, to whom occult powers are attributed, and then, in the role of producer eventually, he joins a high-flying folk-music venture, in the company of his cousin Brian from the Irish side of the family and of the weird Darcy Burr. Broderick is the Devil, or the magus that trafficks ...”

“... and he says things like that again and again. They shake my faith in the man’s reasoning powers till it totters. The same applies to his poetry. When he starts picking at a philosophic or didactic vein, the poem totters and often falls down. Patrick Kavanagh’s life was a sad, not to say miserable one, with real poverty his closest neighbour, with ...”

“... With the Romantics, translation becomes a proof of the ‘esemplastic’ (Coleridge’s term) powers of human sensibility, of the capacity of the imagination to internalise intuitively and metamorphically other imaginations, other felt realities. Goethe adduces, mysteriously enough, a supreme order of translation in which the translator’s text will not ...”

“... The male armadillo also, as Buffon coyly puts it, ‘shows external signs of great progenitive powers’, that is, it has a penis two-thirds the length of its body. After observing, with some inaccuracy, that the armadillo’s shell was like that of a turtle or a crawfish, Buffon asserted that a good description, without definitions ... a particular ...”

“... room of a newspaper office on Dupont Street: it was twelve feet long, with five thousand keys. As Thomas Mullaney explained in his exhaustively researched The Chinese Typewriter (2017), the first real progress came in the 1910s when two engineering students in the US – Zhou Houkun at MIT and Qi Xuan at NYU – refused to accept that the problem lay in hanzi ...”

“... enjoyed Indian careers of their own, and his eldest daughter, Charlotte, married the son of Sir Thomas Metcalfe, the British resident at Delhi. Mount has always been intrigued by cliques, elites and who knows who. The Shakespears were connected to the Thackerays (Augusta was the novelist’s cousin), and with the Metcalfes also thrown in, Mount is able to ...”