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“... e lo mio di fuori lo dimostra in alcuna nuova sembianza’; ‘[this thought hath such lordly power] that my heart (that is, my inner man) trembles, and my outward man shows it by taking on a new semblance.’ (The italics are mine; the translation is Katharine Hillard’s 1889 version.) The people whom Dante encounters are seen with their inner selves on ...”

“... open.’ The facts themselves, undressed, intoxicate her; ordinary things turn out to have strange power to move us, banality itself is mysterious, accumulations of detail take flight into commentary and insight. Anita Brookner is more like Bowen than Munro. ‘One Sunday, when an iron cold and stillness had settled over London, when the false early spring was ...”

“... of the British edition, Colm Tóibín calls it ‘a tour de force … a novel of immense power and scope, reminiscent of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections and Don DeLillo’s Underworld’. Tóibín is also the novel’s UK publisher, under the Tuskar Rock imprint, which may have something to do with it, but ...”

“... offered his list of the attributes that might make a great philosopher. He looked for intellectual power and depth; a grasp of the sciences; a sense of the political, and of human destructiveness as well as creativity; range and imagination; unwillingness to settle for the superficially reassuring; and – if really lucky – the gifts of a great writer. ‘If ...”

“... and dowdy woman who gobbled her food’, and seemingly reliable stories attest to the tyrannical power she exerted over Kipling. One has her interrupting his after-dinner conversations with ‘Rud, it is time you went to bed,’ which he obeyed meekly. Later she would threaten to throw herself out of the window if he didn’t do as she wanted. But one can ...”

“... to Bishop Berkeley and W.B. Yeats, there is such a robust Irish faith in the imagination’s power to summon new worlds into existence. Philosophically, this suspicion of realism went hand in hand with a rejection of rationalism and materialism. If there is such an entity as the Irish mind, it is of a strongly idealist bent. Realism was in any case never ...”

“... of crushing banality: ‘The 17th century was a most exciting time, with its shifts in political power, and with its rise and fall of kings, there was, predictably enough, a rise and fall in the fortunes of many of the subjects.’ Again: ‘While the emerging middle class was in general looking more to reading as a source of information, enlightenment and ...”

“... bad thing for a paragon of piety. A perplexed or misspent adolescence emphasised the transforming power of grace in both Catholic hagiography and puritan conversion narratives. She was born into a Castilian merchant family in 1515, but her fortunes were compromised by her family’s dubious status. Her converso grandfather was suspected by the ...”

“... out a reason for all this connectedness. It says that the new mission is to ‘give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together’.Hmm. Alphabet’s mission statement, ‘to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’, came accompanied by the maxim ‘Don’t be evil,’ which has been the ...”

“... of meadow-bound bulls and the odd curveting heifer, with punchy but obscure straplines (‘Horton: power with dairyness’). The brochures were advertising bull semen. You filled in your picks and a few weeks later a vet would pitch up with a supercooled urn and a large syringe. Nowadays, human sex cells are big business too. The small-ads pages of US ...”

“... see the folks who disapproved of her. It all gets a little desultory after that, partly because Jonathan Pryce has decided to play Perón as just a nice chap – a little reserved and distant, but certainly a gentleman compared with all of Evita’s other fellers. You also start thinking about the limits of the genre the movie belongs to: the pop ...”

“... of language, the validity of literature as an institution, the university as an instrument of power, the authority of a literary canon, male domination in English grammar, the alleged speciousness of logocentrism, or the several theories of hermeneutics. We knew, having read Bateson’s books, that he had political attitudes: he didn’t regard linguistic ...”

“... of empire were still being fashioned in Ireland. In the early and worst period of British power in Bengal Scots had a disproportionately large share; ‘Scots rapacity’ and penury made them perhaps more willing than Englishmen to risk premature death. One Scotsman’s effects, listed at Calcutta, included the works of Shakespeare, Milton and ...”

“... intermediate space between the self and certain objects in later life. In the past, the power of objects to play this transitional role has been tied to the ways in which they enabled the child to project meanings onto them. The doll or the teddy bear didn’t change, didn’t do anything. Relational artefacts are decidedly more active. With ...”

“... socialists who had toppled them, and its cult of leadership struck a chord. When Hitler came to power in 1933, they were given the chance to play a role again. Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski had been forced to run a taxi firm under the Weimar Republic; Ludolf von Alvensleben’s car firm, which he had set up after losing his Polish estate, went bankrupt; Karl ...”