“... More than a century later, the belief is firmly expressed in The Secret Commonwealth by Robert Kirk (1691), a Scots witness and believer, who says: ‘They are not of such stuff that they can come before God; they are far from Heaven, and safe from Hell.’ So the belief had hung on in Scotland, more than England. It is implied in some of the Border ...”

“... with all sorts of extra patent foods and pills, milk and stout’). His mother was spending the winter in Cannes and he was sent to join her. From there he wrote feverishly to Cox, protesting that all would be well when she met him, as she’d promised to do: ‘you go burning through every vein and inch of me, till I’m all Ka … I’m certainer than ...”

“... though, are a delight and I stand addressing the camera while caressing the 15th-century Sir Robert Waterton and his wife, Cecily. At my back is Lionel, Lord Welles with his bruiser’s face, pudding-basin haircut and elaborate armour, which did not save him from being cut down at Towton on Palm Sunday 1461. Unnoticed on previous visits is a sad little ...”

“... to Perth are direct and immediate (new water) and the harms are diffuse and intergenerational,’ Robert Glennon wrote in National Geographic last year. ‘That’s what makes climate change such an intractable problem.’ There’s no immediate need for desalination in Britain. But ahead of the UK National Adaptation Programme that will be published later ...”

“... Nathan Glazer, Irving Kristol (the future godfather of neoconservatism) and the cultural observer Robert Warshow, whose essays on the movie Western and gangster films would become anthology classics and whose personal mystique resembled James Agee’s without the all-night jags. When Warshow asks Podhoretz out to lunch, ‘I felt as a girl with a secret ...”

“... an ornate seaside-looking Edwardian clock tower.The Windrush tumbles through the weir on this mild winter morning, but the idyll is deceptive as once, at least, the river has seen slaughter. It was in 1388 that Richard II’s favourite, Robert Vere, led his army floundering along this flooded valley, desperate to escape his ...”

“... ethics survive Auschwitz’, shaken, challenged to the core, ‘but intact’, is the subject of Robert Gordon’s superb book. Its thesis is that very early in his career Levi moved beyond the language of testimony to the ‘language of ethics’, a ‘flexible, sensitive, intelligent language’ that extends his work on the death camps into ‘a ...”

“... exposed his thin skin. For him, Manhattan has always been the opposite of what home was for Robert Frost, ‘the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.’ Wa-a-a-a-h!Winning the presidency was never a deep desire, more a branding scheme that spun out of control, but Trump has tried to turn his victory into a means to compel ...”

“... his last Ode, ‘To Autumn’ (which in effect brought his creative life to an end – in the winter that followed, fatal illness declared itself), there is a comparable but more direct reservation. Keats wrote: ‘Some think I have lost that poetic ardour and fire ’tis said I once had – the fact is perhaps I have.’ This element of serious doubt ...”

“... the Customs in Pakhoi as an agency of Nanking from which it stood to gain nothing. By the late winter, Stella’s health was worsening again. ‘I am wondering now if I have not come to the end,’ she wrote: ‘I do not really mind. I have come to my full stature, such as it is, and do not feel that anything very valuable would be cut off untried by my ...”

“... been made of Out of Africa, the memoir Dinesen wrote under her real name, Karen Blixen, starring Robert Redford and Meryl Streep). And she gave us handouts of Heinrich von Kleist’s inexhaustibly spiralling ‘On the Marionette Theatre’, photocopied from the TLS. I studied with Gillian for a year, we corresponded and met up sometimes in the 1990s, but I ...”

“... words of English and fifty dollars in my pocket’. In New York, she took in work by Philip Glass, Robert Wilson, Richard Foreman and Yvonne Rainer. Babette Mangolte introduced her to the celluloid experiments of Stan Brakhage and Hollis Frampton, Andy Warhol and Michael Snow. At Chelsea’s Elgin Theatre, they watched Snow’s La Région centrale on a ...”

“... of Giovanni’s Room in 1956, James Baldwin travelled to the South to write about race. In the winter of 1959 his essay ‘Nobody Knows My Name’ appeared in Partisan Review. ‘In the fall of last year,’ he wrote, my plane hovered over the rust-red earth of Georgia. I was past thirty, and I had never seen this land before. I pressed my face against ...”

“... interest rates on student loans figured among the main grievances in demonstrations throughout the winter. And the Occupy movement in the US – whose slogan, ‘We are the 99 per cent,’ was reportedly first floated by Graeber himself – has condemned not only the maldistribution of wealth but the related vice of massive consumer debt, in the form of ...”

“... Queen Matilda, hooded like Meryl Streep in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, escapes across a winter landscape. The princes in the Tower are a suspect download soliciting close attention from a child protection unit. All very saccharine, morbid and outmoded – until the disregarded and rundown riverscape was recognised as a prime regeneration ...”