“... questioners are the third generation, groping to find the gaps in their past. If the Jews are the small mystery at the heart of Viennese history, the revolution in art and intellect that it spawned at the turn of the century is the large mystery. Not all of it is now equally mysterious, the more accessible arts least so. Mahler has never ceased to be a ...”

“... on the walls was a large picture, exquisitely painted by Spagnoletto,’ of the martyrdom of St Stephen. The Spanish school evoked the rack, the rapier, the ruff, the spiral ebony chair-leg and the fainting nun, and a world that was now sufficiently distant or in decline (in The Antiquary it is the invasion of Bonaparte, not the Jacobites, for which beacons ...”

“... a Young Man, he asked Katherine Mullin, a senior lecturer at Leeds University, the extent to which Stephen Dedalus’s character was based on Joyce himself. ‘That,’ Mullin reasonably replied, ‘is an extremely complex question.’ ‘Well,’ Bragg snapped back, ‘I want an extremely simple answer to it so that we can move on.’ Truly, he is the ...”

“... positives for how much safety? In the canon of Western jurisprudence, it usually takes only a small number of false positives to call the legitimacy of the whole system into question. It is ‘better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer’ according to William Blackstone’s famous ratio. For the US Supreme Court Justice ...”

“... for attention in the life’s work. ‘Oh these memories down Memory Lane, theyre all very well in small quantities but not to be heaped on as one goes on.’ Burra was born in 1905, one year after Dalí, and brought up in Springfield Lodge, a good size house with a monkey puzzle tree in front and, before the Great War, as many as eight servants to ...”

“... William Easterly, for 16 years an economist at the World Bank, extols the virtues of thinking small when trying to help the poor. He argues that the urge to plan a country’s path to prosperity, without carefully considering the needs of those for whom you’re planning, has led to a little-mentioned but profound failure: $2.3 trillion has been spent on ...”

“... Ungaretti, Allen Ginsberg, Ingeborg Bachmann, Rafael Alberti, John Berryman, Charles Tomlinson, Stephen Spender – we felt en famille. Paz and I and our wives drove to Assisi to see Giotto’s frescos, wandered about the Chiostro dei Morti, and climbed to the Eremo delle Carceri, home to Saint Francis’s stone bed. ‘The only Western saint who resembles ...”

“... disconcerting new novel starts on a note of thrillerish urgency. Molly, at home alone with her small children, hears footsteps in the other room. She clasps them to her, though she needs to move away from them if she is to defend them. Ben, the baby, is too young to feel a sense of emergency, but Viv, at three, is old enough both to co-operate and to do ...”

“... a more general difficulty: that of setting up a new order in the old vocabulary of Leavis and Stephen I-think-continually-of-those-who-were-truly-great Spender. Charlotte Mew, who was born on the edge of the square (and rather surprisingly does have a plaque), might have prompted some different adjectives. I wish Wade had said more about her unsettling ...”

“... writes. Once he was in his late teens, it became fashionable to fall in love with Freud. When Stephen Spender, according to himself, told T.S. Eliot that he had succumbed, Eliot said: ‘There’s nothing I understand more.’ Spender and Freud spent some time in a cottage in Wales when Freud was 18 and produced a little book of drawings and poems ...”

“... play for the Saturday, and if they substituted the one proposed to them ‘they should have small or no company’ – audience – ‘at it.’ The objection was overcome by the offer of £2 above the box-office take – more, it has been estimated, than the normal yield of a full house. The play was duly performed. What was the play? Five descriptions ...”

“... up to £395,000), this is a tremendous example of aspiration coming to fruition,’ says Stephen Oakes, area director for English Partnerships. Inch by inch, the working canal between Limehouse Basin and the Islington tunnel has become a ladder of glass, connecting Docklands with the northern reaches of the City. Footballers, with loose change to ...”

“... good fellow. In practice, of course, it is a law of club life the world over that, apart from very small clubs indeed, no member can know every other member even by sight. Dublin’s large, ancient, honourable and flourishing (well, anyway, ancient) boozing club The Wamps – writers, actors, musicians, painters, sculptors – offers one striking exception to ...”

“... consumption and fossil-fuel burning in the world’s richest countries.The environmental historian Stephen Pyne calls our era the ‘pyrocene’, a global regime of burning: coal and oil, agricultural land and forest, bush and wetland, most of it planned. The Anthropocene, Pyne says, implies dominion over nature. He prefers to emphasise the fact that, wherever ...”

“... jury found that detectives didn’t carry out checks that could have prevented the serial killer Stephen Port from murdering at least three of his victims. The victims’ families believe that this lack of care was motivated in part by homophobia – Port met his male targets on dating apps. Detectives also failed to take such basic steps as running his name ...”