“... Rainier, a shell-shocked war veteran and amnesiac, who meets and eventually marries a dance-hall singer called Paula, played by Greer Garson; he becomes ‘Smithy’ and lives with her in Devon. Some years later, during a visit to Liverpool, he slips and falls. When he regains consciousness he remembers he is Charles Rainier but has forgotten that he is ...”

“... of the modern academy. There is a methodological temptation in analysing the New Testament hall of mirrors to mistrust the text until it suits one’s argument to trust it; so Aslan is inclined to cite that extremely slippery narrative known as the Acts of the Apostles when it will back up what he wants to say. Nor does he question the ancient and ...”

“... Certainly Stoker’s dedication earned him little affection or respect. His friend the Manx writer Hall Caine said that he had ‘never seen, nor do I expect to see, such absorption of one man’s life in the life of another.’ Stoker’s was, he went on, ‘the strongest love that man may feel for man’. One might assume from this that Stoker was a ...”

“... in pain. ‘White Americans know very little about pleasure because they are so afraid of pain,’ James Baldwin wrote, ‘but people dulled by pain can sing and dance till morning, and find no pleasure in it.’ Holiday’s bitter-sweetness – a cocktail of the rambunctious and the rueful – spoke to both sides of this conundrum. Although she was variously ...”

“... directed by Yeats. Other founding members included O’Hara, John Ashbery, Edward Gorey and Donald Hall, all recent Harvard graduates in their early twenties, as well as those like Lurie living in and around Cambridge. Older, established poets, such as Richard Wilbur and Richard Eberhart, added gravitas to the enterprise. ‘The emotional temperature of the ...”

“... had been like. I said I wanted to go up to the Fairy Ring. For I’d had the fairy stories of James Hogg the Ettrick Shepherd read to me and he’d written of this wood, where it was dangerous to go most of the time, and especially to the Fairy Ring. The toadstools, a pale, hideous necklace of poison round the thick, mossy neck of the Ring, had been ...”

“... By the mid-l780s Knight moved in the liberal, not to say liberated Whig circles that had Charles James Fox as a hero, and ancient Athens as an inspiration. Knight’s first literary attempt was to describe a tour of Sicily in 1777. He hired two artists to accompany him, and briefed them to make meticulous drawings of the archaeological sites. His commentary ...”

“... idiot in the ways of the world’, an ‘anomalous character’, envious, blundering, clownish. James Prior’s full, scholarly biography, designed to restore Goldsmith’s dignity, did not appear until 1837 and was quickly supplanted by two popularising and very popular works, John Forster’s The Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith (1848) and ...”

“... red brick terraces of the Lisburn Road, where Ulster banners fly from the lampposts, to the City Hall with its eau-de-nil dome and pale stone statue of Queen Victoria. The clinic isn’t easy to find: the signs beside the door at No 14 are for BioKinetic Europe, which runs clinical trials, MKB Law, and Bupa; next door there’s a Tesco Express and Boojum, a ...”

“... perhaps the most like Grendel’s arm after Beowulf tears it off and hangs it up in Hrothgar’s hall: huge, a bit of a mess, and, in its vastness, terrifying to contemplate. The earliest discussions call this kind of verse ‘melic’ (the Greek melos means ‘song’), and roughly distinguish sung poems from epic and tragedy. Aristotle, who had a strong ...”

“... world of Eilis Lacey is a little like the inner world of Tóibín’s previous hero – the Henry James of The Master (2004). Like James, Eilis Lacey has a novelist’s eye for detail. Here is how she responds to her first glimpse of Mrs Kehoe’s sitting-room: She saw an old gramophone and a wireless in another corner and ...”

“... his company’s public repertoire at the Globe, received its first documented performance before James I’s court at Whitehall on 26 December 1606. It was then printed in 1608, as M. William Shak-speare, his True Chronicle History of the life and death of King LEAR and his three daughters, but even after spending fifteen years or more training and nerving ...”

“... starts in the first book with Penelope coming down from her private quarters into the great hall, to find a bard performing to throngs of her suitors; he’s singing about the difficulties the Greek heroes are having in reaching home. She isn’t amused, and in front of everyone she asks him to choose another, happier number. At which point young ...”

“... who painted it, when, where or why. Two years ago, at the instigation of David Bindman, Catherine Hall, Esther Chadwick and myself, the V&A subjected the canvas to a lengthy, state-of-the-art scientific examination. Frustratingly, its published report could not answer any of these questions.And then, a few months ago, everything changed. On a hunch, I asked ...”

“... analysis. The famous descriptions in Notes of the natural stone bridge over a branch of the James River, and of the passage of the Potomac through the Blue Ridge Mountains, establish the picturesque by means of cunningly juxtaposed evocations of the sublime and the beautiful. (The first of these terms, perhaps because American topography was supposed ...”