“... the restrictions of what it contained and, resisting all impatient access, leaving the intractable mark of genius on it, in more, and more unforgettable, images than any other novel ever written. Proust aimed at the sublime. His addiction to hyperbole could become a lame – on occasion even an absurd – striving for it: few passages in Western literature ...”

“... anything in the 1990s, yet between 2005 and 2008 prices soared: wheat and maize grown in the US rose by about 130 per cent; so did American soya, which goes mostly to animal feed. Dairy prices shot up (butter by 74 per cent, powdered milk by 69 per cent); the price of chicken went up by two-thirds. A month before the banking meltdown in 2008, ‘food ...”

“... whose parents were born in Bangladesh. ‘No matter how many times you give them information, or mark their card, they still contaminate the bloody recycling bins. They hide all sorts of stuff at the bottom of the organic bins – like machine parts. There’s no telling them.’ He showed me one of the bins outside a large house; it had grass on the top and ...”

“... lookMy life hung on her life:I felt it but knew it not.Speechless, I lisped to herAnd rustled the rose garlands:Thus, she awoke from her slumber.She looked at me; with this lookHer life hung on my life,And all about us was Elysium.Central to Klopstock’s poem is the idea of unconsciousness. The young woman, asleep, does not feel the poet bind her with ...”

“... mend cars, keep dogs, but still have wondrously youthful chests and are always up for it. Dogs may mark the point at which Sallis and his deconstructed/reinvented crime novel break away from the form as we once knew and loved it. Wasn’t Humphrey Bogart as Roy ‘Mad Dog’ Earle, in Raoul Walsh’s film of W.R. Burnett’s High Sierra, undone by a barking ...”

“... historian of the PCI, describes an Apulian peasant who kept a map in his stables where he would mark with a pin the progress of the Russian advance during 1943 and 1944 and then calculate how many hours it would take them to cross the Adriatic and get to his village. In Sicily, militants like Calogero waited for ‘Uncle Joe’ (in Sicilian dialect, lu zi ...”

“... in Nocturne. In other works, the descent of the music into a dark and frightening place is felt to mark the structural core: as in the Serenade, for example, which is centred on settings of Blake’s ‘The Sick Rose’ and the spine-chilling Lyke Wake Dirge, or in the War Requiem, where the point of greatest expressive ...”

“... into a pub lunch of ‘two slabs of peat around a conger eel’ (‘Clive was very quick off the mark,’ Heaney drily recalled in an interview with Karl Miller). There is an interesting account of the reception of North in R.F. Foster’s new study, a compact but comprehensive guide to Heaney. Foster is well attuned to the shifting contexts, as one would ...”

“... without upsetting Britain’s prospects on the Cambo oilfield, Jet Zero, the Whitehaven coal mine, Mark Carney’s fantasy-football $130 trillion Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, and the reported five-hundred-plus fossil-fuel lobbyists in attendance, as well as Claire O’Neill, his predecessor as the COP president, who after Boris Johnson had her ...”

“... Rakhine in the marketplaces and children had been schooled together. Those checkpoints now mark the limits on movement for Rohingya in surrounding villages, and the towns where they once lived and worked are no longer open to them. Only one adequately equipped hospital in the state will accept them, but they are attended to in segregated wards. This ...”

“... an unhappy, or even tragic view of people in the world, which is often attributed to Freud; and Mark Edmundson, in his introduction to Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings, makes some similar fine distinctions. Freud is ‘our prose-poet of the heart’s desire to break’, he writes, but the master also relishes his own reductiveness. Edmundson ...”

“... of Thomas’s ‘infantile egocentricity’ in Llareggub Revisited (1962) represents a high-water mark of Leavisite moralism. Thomas shows ‘an impotence of language belonging to an impotence in living’, Holbrook said, and quoted Grigson’s view with approval: ‘His poetry as near as may be is the poetry of a child, volcanic, and unreasoning.’ These ...”

“... while you’d rather have my kidney than your money – possibly for resale to a third party at a mark-up. So we can swap to mutual advantage. In the jargon, the position we reach when I get the £2000 and you have my kidney is Pareto-optimal as regards the initial position: we have made someone (in fact, each of us) better off, while making nobody worse ...”

“... advance notice so that they suffer in the meantime, and who makes them wear white ribbons as a mark of sin, a reminder that they have strayed from purity. In this village, even the children might be villains. The way some of the children band together around Klara, the oldest of the pastor’s children, had always seemed odd to the narrator. Her brother ...”

“... dente subversive whose name was reviled at gymkhanas and golf tournaments around the county – he rose in our esteem. I find it odd, but not surprising, that he’s once again a family man – in my family at any rate. In the last two years I’ve reinvested in the productions of Mopheads Inc at the request of two boys under the age of six for whom the death ...”