“... Notes’, treatises On Entrails and On Winds, a study of the spheres (details of which may inform his speech in Lucan) and a brontoscopic calendar, detailing what thunder would portend on any given day of the year. St Jerome later called Nigidius ‘a Pythagorean and a sorcerer’, and the occult turn of his intellectual pursuits and his habit of ...”

“... the New Deal and class struggle. Consumer society was put in its place.Marxism, whatever else it may be, is not a view of life. It seems to do best when it is grafted, often improbably, onto a deeper metaphysics – Messianic half-hopes, Hegelian negativity, existentialism, even a dazzled vestigial faith in poetry or music. What the graft was in Davis’s ...”

“... every opportunity and failing fully to seize it, becoming less convincing with every attempt. She may well win the face-off, but Salvini still has the power to pull the plug on her government by withdrawing the support of his 66 MPs and 29 senators (unless they ditch him as leader first; there were calls from senior members of the Lega for him to go the day ...”

“... trying hard to prioritise reviews for the most urgent cases. This means we may be unable to review your ID or it may take a long time.’ In other words: you’re almost certainly not important enough.Having not heard back from Instagram, I eventually decided to set up a new account, a fake one under ...”

“... times before but is none the worse for that. It is still an enjoyable read, whatever else it may be, and every bit as much of an atmospheric period piece as Gwen Raverat’s famous reminiscences of more or less the same time – even if no two atmospheres could be more different than draughty Cambridge and richly-upholstered Vienna on either side of the ...”

“... with the artist, who had been similarly equipped.                   I may be needing a new cover, signals Cupcake, John Hollander’s secret agent in his marvellous book-length poem Reflections on Espionage:                                      I worry Mostly, though, how having been made ...”

“... is one of those who is always insisting on his weight, as James inveterately insists on his wit. May Week was in June, the third of James’s ‘Unreliable Memoirs’, has on its front cover a photograph in which the author, a somewhat weathered undergraduate, has the look of a confident college footballer, and on the back a more recent portrait in which he ...”

“... In the 18th century, as the profession emerged from its gentlemen-and-surveyors phase, it may have seemed that art had rules – that aesthetic and practical decisions were of the same kind. This consensus on taste, if it ever existed, was brief. Intuition, often dressed as a moral imperative – Gothic is true, ornament is crime, displayed ...”

“... followed in 1955, as having grown ‘quite immediately out of’ it. Yet, though the later book may have been conceived as polemical, it turned out to have a more valuable function as a work of exploration. It was nothing less than ‘An Inquiry into the Syntax of English Poetry’. English poetry? There was some confusion in the Movement about a ‘return ...”

“... to this day in many parts of the world. With the coming of agriculture, even the food problem may have worsened. How do we unravel this paradox? It can be argued that sedentism increases the vulnerability to climatic disasters – nomads just move on. In the long run, tilling the soil, accompanied as it usually is by the intrusions of ...”

“... attitudes. But the Greek notion of Eros as a tyrannical god who forces people into behaviour which may prove disastrous does not suggest that the lover thinks mainly about power, but rather that he may himself be a victim. Also, attitudes to homosexuality seem to have varied according to social class. Young men of the upper ...”

“... is a culture of narcissism. If you rather admire these people’s attitudes and way of life, you may describe it as a culture of tolerance. If you have mixed feelings, you might settle for the description Charles Taylor suggests: it is a culture of authenticity. Taylor says that we ought neither to boost this culture (in the manner of the truly dreadful ...”

“... to varieties of literary practice and authorial intention. Those tedious old rows of cabbages may, after all, represent a sovereign design: cabbages are kings, OK? This is a very interesting argument, presented with an energy and volubility powerful enough to command assent. I balk pleasurably at a few marginal things, but find only one matter that might ...”

“... there would be no restraints. ‘You must tell the truth as you see it. However unflattering it may be.’ I wonder, had he lived to read it, if he would have regretted this carte blanche. It’s not that Connon is unfair – he is clearly sympathetic to his subject – but he pursues the truth doggedly, while Nichols himself would twist and distort any ...”

“... of history. Readers who have never heard of him, or his controversial interpretation of Hegel, may be curious to know why in 1992 – the year when Sarajevo came back into the headlines, when Los Angeles burned, and the Earth was lost at Rio – Kojève should be hailed as the prophet of the hour. The origin of this year’s media hype for Fukuyama’s ...”