“... my eyes were opening, it was usual for critics to consider that Donne in his earlier poetry held broad and enlightened views on church and state, that he was influenced by the recent great scientific discoveries, and that he used the theme of freedom in love partly as a vehicle for those ideas ... I was imitating this Donne, the poet as so conceived, in my ...”

“... at what Wordsworth called ‘getting and spending’. His phrasing sometimes sounds rather like William Blake, whose name and example as a London poet crops up quite a lot, or like Coleridge at his most indignant: this is a story of native genius held in thrall by the hostile forces of trade – what Hill refers to at one point, in a Poundian spirit, as the ...”

“... new.Danton thought he had the story straight: ‘He can’t fuck, and he’s afraid of money.’ Broad-brush portrayal is as far as many historians ever get, because Robespierre is judged in a way that is visceral as much as intellectual. He is a monstrous archetype of the grand inquisitor and mystic, and both historians and imaginative writers have been ...”

“... triumphant eclecticism’. Among the figures he mentions are, of course, Anquetil-Duperron and Sir William Jones, the founder of Indology, whose researches on the Orient, Hinduism and the Sanskrit language include translations from – and, in effect, the recovery of – the great fourth-century Sanskrit poet Kalidasa. Yet Said is hard on Jones – ‘whereas ...”

“... refugee. ‘The question of the Arab refugees is a moral issue which rises above diplomacy,’ William Zukerman, the editor of the Jewish Newsletter, wrote in 1950. ‘The land now called Israel belongs to the Arab Refugees no less than to any Israeli. They have lived on that soil and worked on it … for twelve hundred years … The fact that they fled in ...”

“... gentiles such as John Bolton; Robert Bartley, the former Wall Street Journal editor; William Bennett, the former secretary of education; Jeane Kirkpatrick, the former UN ambassador; and the influential columnist George Will are also steadfast supporters. The US form of government offers activists many ways of influencing the policy ...”

“... of public business or its reductive impact on his imagination. In the mid-18th century the poet William Mason, like Marvell a native of Hull, proudly remembered how after 1660 Marvell’s ‘daring genius’ rose to ‘loftier heights’ than ‘beauty’s praise, or plaint of slighted love’, and ‘led the war’ against ‘freedom’s foes’. By the ...”

“... makes us smarter? That depends on what you mean by ‘smart’. Psychologists distinguish two broad types of intelligence. ‘Fluid’ intelligence is one’s ability to solve abstract problems, like logic puzzles. ‘Crystallised’ intelligence is one’s store of information about the world, including learned short cuts for making inferences about ...”

“... with the Vindication is that Burke carries it off with such gusto that innocent readers such as William Godwin took it literally and were convinced by the myth that it was intended to demolish; some even believed that it might be the work of Bolingbroke, who was actually Burke’s target. The Enquiry, by contrast, is an excursion of daring and originality ...”

“... round, I see out of the corner of my eye a middle-aged woman crossing over towards the car with a broad smile on her face. I assume I have been recognised and am about to be accosted and compose my features in a look of kindly accommodation. Even so I am a little taken aback when the woman, without even knocking on the window, actually opens the car ...”

“... foreigners whose favour they courted so assiduously. The result is a rich account on a stunningly broad canvas, populated by a fascinating array of characters. Mythic figures (Lincoln, Grant, Lee, Jackson), seen afresh, acquire sharper outlines. Second-tier players have their moment in the limelight: the secretary of state ...”

“... in his pantheon of practitioners, but Dillon’s responsiveness is wide, to Virginia Woolf, to William Gass, to Susan Sontag, to Lester Bangs and to Roland Barthes (his first and most important inspiration). Most practitioners regard essay-writing as a sideline – Davenport set store by his stories, so much less vital than his non-fictional prose – but ...”

“... from Kipling ironising in indulgent prose. When in India, he had visualised Parnellites such as William O’Brien and T.P. O’Connor as figures of fun: not now. The real force of the poem lay in a quality alien to the interests of Henley and Fitzroy Bell. When Fitzroy Bell saw it, ‘Cleared’ was in the Irish dialect Kipling used for his Irish soldiers ...”

“... Gallery tells me that Breakspears was once the childhood home of Elizabeth Stephen, the bride of William Hallett, who together constitute Gainsborough’s Morning Walk, and that Reynolds’s Captain Tarleton used to hang in the house. Captain Tarleton is one of the paintings (another being Millais’s Lorenzo and Isabella) which would figure in a dream ...”

“... suburbs I felt I’d journeyed to the England of the 1970s. An air of homely neglect hung over the broad avenues of large semis. In London there is more money than space, or time; here, it was the opposite. The Ellington and Hereson School is a set of shining white blocks built in 2007 as part of Labour’s PFI programme. As well as Farage, Charlie Leys, the ...”