“... might be gained by consuming it. Incised amulets from ancient Greece show signs of scraping, which may indicate that the powder produced was mixed with liquid and drunk. Christianity inherited the sympathetic view of the cosmos, as well as the connection between physical healing and blessing. In the sixth century, a man was cured of his intestinal worms after ...”

“... representation, worries about what makes one picture more aesthetically valuable than another may come to seem secondary in comparison. Philosophers have taken two rather different approaches to the problem. The first declares that a picture represents an object by copying its form and colour. The second, which arose in reaction to the first, and has ...”

“... the knowledge that you have unknown enemies lurking in the shadows hasn’t changed. Such attacks may have serious consequences, and this is formally recognised. Like their numberless digital counterparts, assaults on paper are a criminal offence. The Malicious Communications Act (1988) makes it illegal in England and Wales to ‘send or deliver letters or ...”

“... thee [wit] do very oft prove fools,’ Feste says in Twelfth Night. ‘I that am sure I lack thee may pass for a wise man.’ Erasmus and King Lear give us the conceit of the fool’s ability – unique among courtiers – to speak truth to power without fear. ‘Kings do hate the truth,’ Erasmus observes in The Praise of Folly (1511). ‘But my fools ...”

“... or mushrooms) which either contributed to or was projected onto the whole complex. However that may be, the myths which flowed into the Sabbath all converged on the notion of a journey to the beyond and back again, of a crossing over to the world of the dead and returning from it. Ginzburg ends by arguing that the permanence of this theme, through ...”

“... sense, but something of a culture-hero for both his time and our own. In this portrait there may be noted a stress which illuminates the observation that ‘poetry for [Pope], as for his great predecessors, is emphatically more a social than a personal institution’ – a debatable point when made concerning Pope, but perhaps relevant to the book’s ...”

“... what’s the profit? Only that, in time We half-identify the blind impress All our behavings bear, may trace it home. But to confess, On that green evening when our death begins, Just what it was, is hardly satisfying, Since it applied only to one man once, And that one dying. This poem is about the fear of dying, of extinction, to which Larkin confessed in ...”

“... into the clayThrough seven heroic centuries;Cast your mind on other daysThat we in coming days may beStill the indomitable Irishry.Yeats died on 28 January 1939. Two days earlier, W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood had arrived in New York. When Auden heard of Yeats’s death, he sought to ascertain what time of the day or night he had died. He was ...”

“... you say. And I miss you. No Master is majestic except to devotees of English Verse, his virtues may not be at all domestic. Housewifely traits don’t make me love you worse. All couples living irritate each other. I have my nuisance value – like a cat. But still it’s value – Irritation’s brother can still be Love, you see. Just think of ...”

“... the sky was like cardboard, the same depthless no-colour as the pavements and buildings. It was May, and pink cherry blossoms lay and shoaled in the gutter, bleeding as after some wedding ... Broken glass, corrugated tin and spraygunned plywood saying Arsenal rules the world. Twenty floors up Chantry Point, the grey diamond panels over two arsoned windows ...”

“... Are weextinct yet. Who ownsthe map. May Ilook. Where is myclaim. Is my historyverifiable. Have Iincluded the memoryof the animals. The animals’memories. Are theystill here. Are wealone. Lookthe filamentsappear. Of memories. Whose? What waslandlike. Did it movethrough us. Something says nonstopare you hereare your ancestorsreal do you have abody do you haveyr self inmind can you see yrhands – have you broken itthe thread – try to feel thepull of the otherend – make sureboth ends arealive when u pull totry to re-enterhere ...”

“... hook-and-eye unfastened in the sweetmeat of a heart you thought would never grieve or come undone. May; and already it’s autumn: broken gold and crimson in the medieval beechwoods, where our shadows come and go, no darker than the figures in a book of changes, till they’re hexed and singled out for something chill and slender in this world, more ...”

“... not to live, in short, where one does live!’ Where one does live, or does not, as the case may be. He alludes to a literary colleague as ‘slowly dying’, and then reflectively describes another as ‘slowly living’; crammed as it was with goings-on, the essential inward writer’s rhythm of James’s own life was a slowly-dying and ...”

“... is that he eludes the art historians. With Vermeer expert knowledge doesn’t take you far. There may be symbolic significance in a discarded broom, say, or an unemptied laundry basket, but that is not the point of the painting. The paintings are about women and about loving women, as he must surely have done; most of the men in differing degrees ...”