“... spirit begins to play a major rhetorical role is Heidegger’s rectorship Address of 1933, when he took over the leadership of his university. This failure to avoid speaking of spirit is not remarked on by Heidegger. Derrida considers whether Heidegger’s inconsistencies are unconscious slips or deliberate concealments. He even suggests that Heidegger’s ...”

“... Switzerland ceased to be such friendly territory for the SDECE. On coming to power, de Gaulle took a directly personal interest in the SDECE – and asked them what they could tell him about the Russians. He was ‘ulcerated at the banality’ of what followed, for the fact was that the service was far too embroiled in North African affairs to bother much ...”

“... others in Jamaica: it may seem surprising that such men as Dickens, Tennyson, Kingsley and Ruskin took the opposite view – Carlyle indeed called Harrison’s party ‘nigger-philanthropists’. He wanted Home Rule for Ireland, and later stood as a Parliamentary candidate on Gladstone’s side. He saw that the suspension of habeas corpus was not the way to ...”

“... he was happy and fruitful in Manchester and felt especially loyal to the Vice-Chancellor, Sir John Stopford (who, I add from personal knowledge, was also one of the nicest men known to science). Although as a school of organic chemistry Cambridge was at that time ‘virtually nonexistent’, it had possibilities, and after securing some administrative ...”

“... Last Easter, my family and I took a holiday house in the West Highlands. The windows of the cottage looked onto a salt marsh, and beyond that, to the fast-moving waters of the Kyles of Lochalsh. Across the waters rose the hills of southern Skye, still dusted with snow. Nearby stood the unloved stone ruin of a barracks built to house government troops engaged on the Highland-suppressing project that followed Culloden ...”

“... and that to encourage urination – and hence to lessen the danger of kidney stones – one took a spoonful of ‘ginger jam’ before dinner. Some of the advice is common sense – what would today come under the rubric of ‘healthy lifestyle’ – though a ‘prayer to stop the flow of blood’ might prove unhelpful in an emergency. There is ...”

“... Christmas Crackers, the entertaining commonplace chapbooks he compiled yearly from 1969 to 2019, John Julius Norwich established as a principle that each quotation, however short, must appear alone on a page. If it couldn’t stand up to that spotlight, it shouldn’t be included. Offill’s marooned paragraphs are bathed in a more forgiving light, but they ...”

“... by the outstanding writers associated with it, such as Robert Penn Warren (All the King’s Men), John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, even Robert Lowell, who literally pitched his tent on Tate’s lawn. All of these must have responded warmly to Robert Frost’s patriotic poem ‘The Gift Outright’: ours before we were the land’s. She was our land more than a ...”

“... while being reproached by more decisive, or more outraged, comrades such as Edward Thompson and John Saville, who left to establish an independent journal. But in the spring of 1957 he accepted the inevitable and left the party.It can be hard now to recover what a volcanic existential crisis this was for those, like Hill, whose lives had for so long been ...”

“... may prefer Marguerite Porete, burning alive with her book, or the rich black intersection of St John of the Cross or the pyroclastic whisper of Anonymous, Unknown Author. Or something a little closer to home – Jeannie, for instance, the family friend whom my father (a Catholic priest in full cassock) calls simply a Eucharistic mystic, so guilelessly, and ...”

“... the interests and weaknesses of others. In Lucina’s Rape, Rochester’s adaptation of John Fletcher’s tragedy Valentinian (c.1610-14), Marcellina, a lady in waiting, shows her worldliness by parroting typical male arguments against women’s chastity: ‘This Honour is the veriest Mountebanke … what a cheate must that bee/Which robbs our lives ...”

“... wasn’t the only reason: Emecheta’s prose isn’t polished and her plots can be jerky.) She took a job as a social worker and continued to write, eventually showing Second-Class Citizen to Elizabeth Stevens of Curtis Brown, who had the good idea of sending it to Allison and Busby, run by Margaret Busby, the UK’s first Black woman publisher. ‘Here ...”

“... of evanescent beings’, only to round off the paragraph by observing that Margaret Parker ‘took evanescence to the limit by dying’. Biographer and subject could hardly be closer in step than they seem while Byron is pursuing his fashionable conquests in England, and debonairly describing them to his Cambridge men friends and to his favourite woman ...”

“... he could, he hid his misery behind better things, covered the lesser with the pleasure that he took in small acts of recovery. These ‘small acts’ include his creative accounts of racial aggression towards him. That of ‘some high-spirited vagabonds chasing me through half-deserted streets’ carries a rueful updating of the dignified melancholy of ...”

“... which had, in the words of its current chairman (Francis Carnwarth, the personable banker who took over from Mark Girouard), ‘saved 18th-century Spitalfields’. There were warm memories from the early days of art-historical activism: the squats and sit-ins which the Trust’s members undertook as they confronted the vandalism of private developer and ...”