“... new problem. What did Christianity mean in this alien world? The Jesuit answers came from first-class minds with an equally first-class humanist education and training in classical rhetoric. Just as the first followers of Jesus had taken a Gospel message to Greco-Roman society constructed on very different philosophical ...”

“... me not only bad but remarkably vulgar as well, with the sort of involuntary vulgarity which upper-class assumptions of universal ownership entail. ‘Solid with yearning’ is an almost perfect description of something in Lowell himself, but simply makes a graffiti scribble across the simple mystery of Woman in Blue Reading a Letter. Vermeer is the reverse of ...”

“... much better than all that.’ Discotheques originated in occupied Paris during the Second World War. The Nazis banned jazz and closed many of the dance clubs, breaking up jazz groups and driving fans into illicit cellars to listen to recorded music. One of these venues – on the rue Huchette – called itself La Discothèque. Then Paul Pacine opened the ...”

“... as a transparent cover for a bit of fun, and the euphemism is kept up respectfully in court. Class solidarity sometimes led magistrates to express their regret at inflicting ruin on MPs or men with distinguished military records. ‘This case is a tragedy,’ declared Mr Pratt, fining Major Fitzroy Fyers for persistently importuning in the tube station ...”

“... For two decades – more or less since the Falklands War, and the end of the military dictatorships that had become an international byword for counter-revolutionary ferocity – South America has been largely forgotten by world politics. Recycled democratisation, debt and dependency offered few conflicts and yielded no consequences to compare with dramas in Eastern Europe or Russia, the Middle or Far East, even domestic convulsions in North America ...”

“... stocks of fly powder on the old regime, and seeing who was left standing. ‘A privileged class,’ Sieyès wrote, ‘is like a pestilence upon the nation.’ In a related image, also somewhat Lenin-like in its apparent ruthlessness, he responded to the anxieties of those who wondered what would happen to the first two estates if the third estate ...”

“... collateral victims of the Olympic gaze: heavy-pelted German Shepherds, down on their luck, war veterans with a folk memory of clover-munching sheep; fluffed-out, pinkish creatures on very thin legs, like wealthy matrons from the Kolonaki district caught in the rain without their dark glasses. Feral packs once roamed the city, it’s what dogs ...”

“... like Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle, in which Germany and Japan win the Second World War and divide the US between them. But these historical variants are not genuine time-travel narratives on the order of H.G. Wells’s Time Machine (1895), which inaugurates the standard narrative of the history of science fiction, to the detriment of Jules ...”

“... toll from Covid last year. It’s about twenty times as many as the current annual deaths from war, murder and terrorism combined. Put another way, air pollution kills twenty thousand on an average day, more than have died in the aftermath of all the meltdowns in the history of nuclear power: Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Fukushima and all the others put ...”

“... of history it is action that counts: ‘Honour is flashed off exploit,’ he wrote: But be the war within, the brand we wield Unseen, the heroic breast not outward-steeled, Earth hears no hurtle then from fiercest fray. It seems to me that Bishop’s fiercest frays, the moral overcomings recorded both in her advance in her medium and in her penetration to ...”

“... in 1984, two months after Able Archer, the Nato exercise that brought the world closer to war than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Manser’s flight to the forest had a good deal of fantasy about it, but there was nothing bogus or half-hearted about his efforts to immerse himself in the life of the Penan. They were the human equivalent of ...”

“... player. Christopher Ricks describes the technique as conveying ‘by sabotage that there was a war on’, and he takes this passage as a prime example: Eliot, he says, is to be seen ‘adopting Oliver Goldsmith’s line … and then undoing it by adding the innocuous little word “and”’. The little word undoes the old rhythm of the original and ...”

“... kinds of complication (seating mourners correctly at a funeral, insulting someone with a second-class stamp, genealogy), my mother has an aversion to others (washing up, replacing a battery, packing or unpacking a suitcase), but I suspect her comment was directed at a larger possibility of difficulty than the merely practical. I didn’t ask because I ...”

“... was one of the poets who got Pound off the American government’s charges of treason after World War Two. But already in 1913 he sensed that Pound’s approval had ulterior motives, as an unpublished poem lamented: In praising me You were not concerned so much with my desert As with your power That you praised me arbitrarily And took credit to yourself In ...”

“... with a wave in the direction of some good bits. On what ageing does to the skin of the middle-class male body: As you pass the half-century, the flesh, the coating on the person, begins to attenuate. And the world is full of blades and spikes. For a year or two your hands are as nicked and scraped as a schoolboy’s knee. Then you learn to protect ...”