“... account of the ‘ruin of Britain’ and the Welsh poem Gododdin) either do not name him or may contain later legendary interpolations. On the other hand, we have a King Arthur with a secure birthdate and a clear biography, whom one can even meet and talk to. He is ‘a modern English Druid chieftain’, a Farnborough biker who, following a visionary ...”

“... service personnel had imperial backgrounds.) That such activity was reviled in mainland Britain may, perversely, have aided its development; if it had been more generally accepted it could have been monitored and controlled. But the existence of MI5, SIS and GCHQ was formally admitted only in the 1980s, and Aldrich gives several examples of GCHQ’s hiding ...”

“... given environment. Philosophers have typically taken this to show that biological generalisations may be valuable in prediction and explanation, but they are not true laws because they have exceptions. Mitchell takes it to show that we need to revise our account of what laws are: on her view, a law is a principle that can be used effectively in explanation ...”

“... Mrs Stitch than her preferences in footwear. Herodas’ poem, too, is not quite as simple as it may appear. It does not take a reader long to spot that the same female character, Metro, features in the poem that comes immediately before the one about the shopping trip in Herodas’ collection; in it she admires a friend’s scarlet dildo and is told that it ...”

“... with a sublime and exceptional love. Hence there neither is nor shall be anything or any fate that may separate me from your love, save death alone.’ The rhetoric of these letters is far from conventional, as some have too hastily claimed. Exuberantly stylised, they are obsessed with the philosophical essence of love. Defining love was a preoccupation of the ...”

“... and a rag, tag and bobtail collection of children followed along too. Ultimately, the mission may well have numbered more than 2000. It was the biggest military column ever seen in those parts. When they got to Timbuktu, Lieutenant-Colonel Arsène Klobb, the resident officer there, strongly advised Voulet and Chanoine to travel more lightly, advice they ...”

“... Deobandi madrasas formed the backbone of the Taliban movements in Afghanistan and Pakistan. They may only account for between 15 per cent and 20 per cent of the Pakistani population but their willingness to take up arms – especially since they were encouraged to do so during the anti-Soviet struggle in Afghanistan – has given them disproportionate ...”

“... on her father’s knee. Here’s the thing, though: I can see the entire picture. I can, you may have noticed, see myself. My observation point is from the top of the wall opposite where we are sitting, just below the ceiling, looking down across the room towards me and my father in the chair. I can see me clearly, but what I can’t do is position ...”

“... ideas, habits, material apparatus and professional skills, and the potency of a fact (what we may call its truth or reality), like that of a religious fetish, cannot survive outside its framework. Gods and facts are not autonomous: they are constructed. Not out of thin air, mere words or wishes, but by collectives using materials and instruments in the ...”

“... What distinguishes Perloff’s neo-modernists, as a class, from Yeats or Hollander or Muldoon may have less to do with what her writers put in than with what they appear to leave out: story, persona, scene. Her programme favours what Bernstein calls ‘anti-absorption’: this work will not let you get lost in it, will not let you even pretend that you ...”

“... morituri whose deaths might seem as edifying as a snuff film. Nonetheless, low brutes though they may have been (among Roman elites, the term ‘gladiator’ could be used as an insult – i.e. ‘thug’ or ‘scum’), gladiators occupied a polyvalent position in Roman elite culture. They were scum who could die like heroes, the lowest of the low, but they ...”

“... and to meet him was a shattering experience of the kind likely to sabotage ambition – which may or may not be a good thing. You wanted to know his opinion on the possible outcome of what is happening here. The answer unfortunately is that he no longer cares to hold opinions, because his life has lost its taste. He ...”

“... peaceably coexist. This is especially true in most contemporary short stories, where the narrator may be wildly unreliable (first person) or reliably invisible (third person), but not wildly visible and reliable. Few younger contemporary writers risk the kind of biblical interference that Muriel Spark hazards, or that V.S. Naipaul practises in A House for Mr ...”

“... I will not tolerate comparison with Bentley. Bentley is alone and supreme.’ However, ‘they may compare me with Porson if they will.’ He was willing, that is, to be compared only with the runner-up for the title of greatest English classical scholar. Ordinary readers, even if they have a bit of Latin, can have little notion of what it means to know it ...”

“... if Sylvie and Ruthie, escaping from Fingerbone, crossing the railway bridge perilously on foot, may (or may not) hear in a moment of extremity ‘some word so true we did not understand it, but merely felt it pour through our nerves like darkness or water’. The book itself, of course, is a redemptive act, a way of ...”