“... How often in my life have I said those words, and yet?’ John Banville, Shroud ‘I had jumped​ ,’ Conrad’s Jim says of his abandonment of his ship, adding a moment later: ‘It seems.’ Marlow, the narrator of the novel who is listening to Jim’s story, says: ‘Looks like it.’ This is one of many instances where Marlow’s language is drier and tougher than his thought, which is unwilling to condone Jim’s act but very sympathetic to the difficulty of living with the memory of it ...”

“... to distinguish between the imaginative transformation of experience and the real thing. The child took his reward for the dentist’s ‘torture chamber’ in the form of ice cream but also of Godey’s Lady’s Book, piles of which lay waiting in the office to beguile him with their tales of fashionable life. He thrilled at an expedition to view the huge ...”

“... bad enough, God knew, in books; but fired at you like this, point blank, by somebody who really took it seriously, why it was really frightful. Why on earth couldn’t people live their lives in a rational, civilised way? Why couldn’t they take things as they came? Breakfast at nine, lunch at one thirty, tea at five. The title of After Many a Summer comes ...”

“... period. Bevilacqua refers to that period as the Enlightenment. As the intellectual historian John Robertson pointed out in The Enlightenment: A Short Introduction (2015), two distinct conceptions of the European Enlightenment are currently in circulation. According to the first, commonly held by philosophers and public intellectuals, the Enlightenment ...”

“... untrustworthy nature of all politicians. It still seems probable that the likes of Steve Baker and John Redwood will vote against the agreement even if doing so destroys the government and the Brexit cause. Perhaps they seek a satisfying martyrdom as the only pure and incorruptible Brexiteers – the Robespierre and Saint-Just of our revolution.Third, what the ...”

“... thing is that only the National Theatre audiences saw and were stunned by this performance. Though John Schlesinger later filmed the play (where HMQ was supported by her corgis) the magic didn’t quite transfer. But Pru was the first and the best. In the central scene of the play the queen has a long conversation with the keeper of the royal pictures, Sir ...”

“... as a hallmark of grace, as once happened in the Highlands. In the 1960s, one Free Church minister took Sabbath observance so earnestly that he forbade his congregation from observing British Summer Time, on the grounds that the clocks had changed at 2 a.m. on a Sunday morning. Church members can now watch television or take a ferry on the Sabbath, a far cry ...”

“... and the shape of books were more than casually connected. As time went by, and electronics took over from mechanical systems for data storage and typesetting, the same was said of computers. George Landow’s Hypertext is about one way of using computers to manipulate texts. He makes high claims for hypertext, a richly interconnected kind of ...”

“... inconsistency unperceived by the speaker’. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Ricks quotes Sir John Mahaffy’s answer, when asked to distinguish the Irish bull from similar freaks of language: ‘The Irish bull is always pregnant.’ More often than the OED appreciates, the Irish bull knows he’s pregnant and is offering his audience an occasion to ...”

“... as accurately as possible the many dialects and regional accents he encountered) noted: ‘I took down what he had to say, just as he said it – without altering a word or adding one.’ He did this because he ‘wished to preserve the memory of the most artless, sociable and exhaustless talker I ever came across. He did not tell me a single remarkable ...”

“... dustily undisturbed among the essays of Shenstone and Stevenson, Birrell and Lynd. ‘It took me a while, I confess, to become interested in my pale “Uncle Octave”,’ Yourcenar reports. Nevertheless, she made a little study of this neglected essayist – and of his beloved brother, Rémo, a melancholy young radical who shot himself (to the music ...”

“... It was not coincidental that the first American revival of Julius Caesar which restored this scene took place in 1937, when books were being burned in Germany: Orson Welles portrayed the plebeians who murder Cinna as Fascist Brown-shirts. In 1937, in 1599, Julius Caesar dramatised an attack on a poet, at a time when poets were being attacked outside the ...”

“... intellectual in politics’ in the sense in which that description applies, for instance, to John Stuart Mill (or even perhaps to Arthur Balfour). Brougham’s intellect could serve him superbly in political life, especially perhaps in the mastery of complex subjects displayed in some of his astonishing speeches. Yet the great 1828 speech on law ...”

“... and balance-sheets, the Loyalist imagination petrified while the libertarian Protestant ethic took on strange and distorted forms. Back in the Sixties when Longley was writing ‘No Continuing City’ Ian Paisley was brooding in a prison cell on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans and attaching that text to an intuition of the essentially corrupt and temporary ...”