“... the gallows, which is so placed respecting the town, that the towns people from the High-Street may sit at their shop doors, and see the criminals executed.’ In this passage (brought to my attention by Lincoln Faller, who uses it effectively in his forthcoming book on Defoe), the reader is invited to share the pain of travel, including seeing too ...”

“... belief that the Chinese care little about individual or human rights, however difficult these may be to realise in a Chinese context, should not survive a reading of these pages. ‘In my first year at university I felt I was surrounded by people in chains. But occasionally I would read Sartre. I was struck by his theory that to exist in this world means ...”

“... for the crime she had committed. Shelley almost certainly knew Muratori’s version and may also have known an early dramatisation by the obscure and prolific Florentine playwright Vincenzo Pieracci (1760-1824), but the only source he mentions in the Introduction to his play is a mysterious ‘old manuscript’, which he describes as ‘copied from ...”

“... later decades was still insisting that it was an enemy within the gates ‘run by reds’. As this may suggest, his interventions were not always well grounded. During the war, he personally rang the duty controller at Broadcasting House to complain about an item he said he had just heard on the nine o’clock news. The controller was able to point ...”

“... R., who’s in turmoil over developments at the magazine and has pretty much decided to resign.10 May, Yorkshire. From being an unqualified admirer of Philip Roth, which I still pretty much am, I feel (as I did about Francis Bacon) that I’ve been told too much. On the plus side he’s very generous, helping friends down on their luck, dispensing large sums ...”

“... turn all that guilt and repression into pure gold; and even if you’re not a Modern Master, you may rightly feel that you’ve succeeded in putting quite a distance between early defeats and present victories. (Note for Freudians: we only start to cast our minds back over early traumas and humiliations when we are already depressed. We are, in a ...”

“... that embellished him made him an angel.’ Besides the complexes that blokes in the 21st century may have about castration and the shivering joy many take in explaining all this to a psychoanalyst, there is another reason the castrato may continue to fascinate us. It is the old idea that while heard melodies are ...”

“... suggests not only that we seldom strike the right balance but that the concept of ‘balance’ may itself be deeply flawed. The first problem with this notion is that it assumes security is a transparent concept, unsullied by ideology and self-interest. Because it benefits everyone – ‘the most vital of all interests’, John Stuart Mill called ...”

“... years younger, knew Rochester rather better than we or any other of the commentators on his life may be said to have done. In the months that followed his death she was to see her uncle become vastly famous, not as Marvell’s ‘best satirist and in the right vein’ or Shaftesbury’s ‘worthy’, but as a rake of the most rapacious and an infidel of ...”

“... of the best ones, are bent on sin. Simply that (for the present venture in criticism) handling sin may be the right way to take hold of the bundle.’ The seven deadly sins and their antitheses, the four cardinal virtues and three heavenly graces, provide the book’s organising principle. A pair of introductions, ‘Sins, Virtues, Heavenly Graces’ and ...”

“... Collectors’ fantasy Christmas present it may have become, but Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies was a series of headaches before it was anything else. Despite the confidently comprehensive title they gave it, the editors of the First Folio, John Heminges and Henry Condell, were defeated by the task of assembling all of their late colleague’s plays: we will never know how many nights’ sleep they lost over their failure to secure a copy of Love’s Labour’s Won, written before 1598 and printed in quarto before 1603, nor what arguments led to the exclusion not just of all Shakespeare’s poems and the single scene he wrote for Sir Thomas More but of three late collaborative plays, Pericles, The Two Noble Kinsmen and Cardenio ...”

“... in her second marriage, ‘seeking wisdom and finding one scarcely knows what’. Maturity may remain too hard to attain, in life and art, for its fictional representation to have been achieved very often. If novels for grown-ups have been rare in England, it has been doubted whether in the US we have produced any at all. Or so things stood in ...”

“... room he had an absent look, staring into space and not uttering a word. Twelve years earlier, in May 1909, Bronia Nijinska had watched her brother wow the audiences of Paris, dancing the role of Armida’s favourite slave in Le Pavillon d’Armide during the first season of the Ballets Russes de Serge de Diaghilev: ‘While he is still up in the air a rumble ...”

“... trafficking of migrants to Greece – on a country, that is, whose human rights record suggests it may not be particularly careful when dealing with Syrian or any other refugees. Of course, Turkish co-operation had a price, and though Merkel had in the past steadfastly opposed the country’s bid for EU membership, now, having changed tack again and speaking ...”

“... when the theory of natural selection has become an article of pop culture, it is faced with what may be the most serious challenge it has had so far. Darwinists have been known to say that adaptationism is the best idea that anybody has ever had. It would be a good joke if the best idea that anybody has ever had turned out not to be true. A lot of the ...”