“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... than, in most cases, power) which they grew to exercise. Already, in the early 1830s, Thomas Barnes, editor of the Times, was privy to official secrets and consulted about ministerial appointments. His successor, Delane, claimed that the paper resembled the Church of the Middle Ages: ‘executor of the public will, informer of the public ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... summer, began by placing him in the capacious context of such postwar avant-garde novelists as Thomas Bernhard, José Saramago and David Foster Wallace, only to acknowledge that, despite a shared affinity for ‘very long, breathing, unstopped sentences’, Krasznahorkai was ‘perhaps the strangest’ of them. The writer is ‘peculiar’; his work is ...”

“... scarcely a glimmer of reservation. In a passage which Gillian Spraggs has done well to disinter, Thomas de Quincey, in the grip of a severe bout of nostalgia, described highwaymen as members of ‘a liberal profession, which required more accomplishments than either the Bar or the pulpit; from the beginning it presumed a most bountiful endowment of heroic ...”

“... of its heat . . . it will provoke a burning fever’. He believed that the dramatic curative powers of the cinchona were discovered by Indians from malarial coastal regions of Ecuador, and that the Spanish learned the secret only when a local chief took pity on a passing Jesuit ill with fever, and cured him with bark fetched from a nearby mountain. When ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... her book, where the metaphysics of New Historicism stick out awkwardly. She invokes these occult powers apropos of the most sensational case in that career, Forman’s connection with the amorous projects of the Jacobean society beauty Frances Howard, who wanted to divorce her husband and marry James I’s favourite Robert Carr, and apparently procured the ...”

“... 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 ...”