“... knew what it meant to manage to ignore them. He knew too that such practised ignorance is neither bliss nor denial but at times a virtue and at times a disaster. The trick is to know which times are ...”

“... advocate. My own hunch is that other Gurney personae usually written off as lunatic fictions – Michael Flood, Frederick Saxby, Valentine Fane, Griffiths Davies and so on: there were many – may yet turn out to be comrades from the trenches, those other persons he so loved. Although writing of place-names rather than people, P.J. Kavanagh puts the matter ...”

“... And now, here’s The Pale King, this book-shaped version of the ‘long thing’, assembled by Michael Pietsch, Wallace’s editor on Infinite Jest, from ‘a neat stack of manuscript, 12 chapters totalling nearly 250 pages’ discovered by Wallace’s agent on the desk in his home office, augmented by a selection from ‘hundreds and hundreds’ of less ...”

“... recurrence of half-lit fires smouldering in the hearth – that 19th-century incubator of domestic bliss. Edith, one of the book’s least lively and most pathetic characters – in her seventies and disfigured by unwanted hair – reaches a state of grace that is the negation of all that has encumbered her. That moment has magic because the predominant mood ...”

“... aid to unfulfilment: But now I see that we can never know Perfection here on earth. For with this bliss That brings me ever closer to the gods, You gave me that cold and insolent companion From whom I can no longer free myself, Who makes me feel my shame and my disgrace, And turns your gifts to dross with every breath. He fans the flames that burn within my ...”

“... Old and New Testament episodes? Art historians will wish to add their own footnotes. According to Michael Baxandall, for instance, what Huizinga calls a 15th-century painter’s horror vacui may simply have reflected the horror of a patron at getting less than his money’s worth, and therefore insisting on crowding a tableau with figures, paid for per ...”

“... more spectacular instances of 19th-century Sapphic impersonation. First is the strange case of ‘Michael Field’: a pair of homosexual female lovers, aunt and niece, whose jointly-authored, Sapphically-inspired verses in Long Ago (1889) set the stage for later lesbian appropriations of the poet. Second up is Swinburne, whose outrageously sado-masochistic ...”

“... bodyguard of the Emperor Nero, and martyred after he was converted to Christianity by St Paul). St Michael is the best-known archangel, and in his role as destroyer of devils is often portrayed in a terrific suit of armour. He is the patron saint of soldiers and police; his shrine on Monte Gargano in southern Italy remembers his support for the Normans as they ...”

“... Michael Sandel’s What Money Can’t Buy does for the market what the London Dungeon does for urban history. It’s a compendium of horror stories arising from what one might call the ryanairation of social life, the breakdown of once cash-free practices into severally billable units of account. Capitol Hill lobbying outfits now pay queuing firms to stand in line, sometimes overnight, so that the lobbyists can step in just before a committee session starts; ‘concierge’ medical companies offer queue-jumping treatment to those willing to stump up the fees ...”

“... every one of these activities demanding the intensity of consciousness that Nabokov recognised as bliss. He offers oblique confirmation in one piece which might possibly justify the whole Boyd/Pyle compilation: a 52-page ‘second addendum’ to The Gift, written in 1939, which Nabokov chose to leave unpublished, now deciphered and translated by his son. It ...”

“... him a sizable audience. The Nightfisherman, a selection of Graham’s letters by his friends Michael and Margaret Snow, with 19 poems, photographs, drawings and his essay ‘Notes on a Poetry of Release’, is the most useful and revealing book on the poet yet published and sets out the clearest record of his life. Graham was born into a blue-collar ...”

“... thing about the writing here is that it’s not voyeuristic, but one of those moments of (textual) bliss when Green seems to lose himself – his gender, his class, his authorial voice – in his characters. ‘It’s only your old uniform . . .’ He longs to be ‘demobbed’, liberated into a state of indeterminacy and ambiguity. Not that it’s possible ...”

“... the dawn of Easter Week, 1916, some youngsters, including O’Faolain, probably felt that it was bliss to be alive, even though Eoin MacNeill was countermanding Pearse’s orders and a revolution was dwindling into a revolt. Still, when Republicans were roaming through Cork and Tipperary shooting at the Black and Tans, it was possible to feel heroic. But it ...”

“... about tax accountants. One, and the most obvious, is a novel about Irish dancers on tour with a Michael Flatley figure whose influence grows more sinister over time. Pounds of verbal oil will be poured into his perm; his bulge will almost rupture his trousers. His backstory – but surely you can picture it. One dancer is addicted to weed, another feels ...”

“... for three years as an infantry officer in France. In 1975 he was moved to write to the historian Michael Howard by exasperation with Paul Fussell’s newly published The Great War and Modern Memory. Fussell, an American critic and veteran of World War Two, suggested that what had happened to those who fought in France was so uniquely dreadful that it defied ...”