“... or Eliot into verse drama and High Anglicanism. Bunting’s Complete Poems are a tantalisingly small and pure uchronia, and as for his life, his model in these things was Walter Raleigh. A Life of Bunting, then, was for many years the most obviously ‘missing’ book I could think of. For all the reasons – the ticked boxes – above; for a rather ...”

“... to them … & a nose with a lump in the middle, & a square jaw and a nameless complexion with small ears almost round & an ordinary neat figure & next to no legs. Is there anything in the outside? Well come in, what is there here? A quick heart that beats for the children. A longing to understand – a great overwhelming ignorance – a sympathy for all ...”

“... The first exhibit is a holographic slave, about to be auctioned, who speaks to visitors from a small underground cage. In the final exhibit holographic prisoners in orange jumpsuits sit behind protective glass. The museum traces the line between slavery and contemporary incarceration in the US – one in three black men spend time in prison; the prison ...”

“... Obscure Object of Desire, 1977).Viridiana has a number of startling and now famous images – a small crucifix flicks open to become a menacing knife; riotous, feasting beggars compose themselves into a parody of Leonardo’s Last Supper, a snatch of Handel’s ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ blaring in the soundtrack – and a ferocious implied argument about ...”

“... since it’s an authorship made up of two people, the challenge is to discover how, like Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, Don Gately and Hal Incandenza, they might ever be brought together at all.) In 2000, DeWitt published a first novel called The Last Samurai; it sold a hundred thousand copies in English, was translated into ten languages and turns up on various ...”

“... your beautiful saintly soul.’ Eliot was a creature of habit: in the mornings, communion at St Stephen’s; in the afternoons, business at Faber, dictating innumerable letters; writing in the evenings; rosaries in the early hours. Letters to Emily, typed from his desk, were a vital part of his amatory and auditory imagination – part of the rhythm of his ...”

“... thus I too work with you in the overthrow of Society.” To which he replied: “The weapon is too small to be of any value.” ’ Ashbee’s experiments, from the workshops of the Guild of Handicraft to town-planning in Jerusalem, showed, as no theoretical writing of his or anyone else’s could, the limits of what ‘romantic socialism’ could ...”

“... exception of two lucid studies of its foundation, Robert Hildebrand’s Dumbarton Oaks (1990) and Stephen Schlesinger’s Act of Creation (2003), each the work of a serious diplomatic historian, little or nothing of analytic interest exists about the organisation, which has proved an intellectual sink-hole, down which swirl the drearily self-serving memoirs ...”

“... Rembrandt, and Wilson, spurns all relation with this kind of map-work. Fuseli did introduce a small saving clause in defence of painters of ‘Views’: their ‘enumerations’ of the objects in a scene become ‘little more than topography’ only if they are not ‘assisted by nature, dictated by taste, or chosen for character’. But this does little ...”

“... expedition: ‘Drop your drift net into the ocean and you pull up all sorts of fish, big and small, and you hope someone’s going to drop the small fish back in before it’s too late but you can never be sure that’s going to happen.’ As well as small fry like Conteh, the law ...”

“... measures were an index of justice: ‘Thou shalt not have in thy bag divers weights, a great and a small. Thou shalt not have in thine house divers measures, a great and a small.’ Ancient and medieval thought ran together the notion of measure and moderation – proportion, due measure, just measure. Double standards were ...”

“... forties, he had built his fortifications: only inside the walls, deep in the central keep, in a small bolted cell, did he allow his most powerful and private emotions to express themselves. In the world beyond the walls, he was ‘Mr Eliot’, an ever courteous facsimile of respectability, a three-piece-suited self desperately searching for forms of ...”

“... Shandy. His glee seems understandable. This obscure Yorkshire clergyman, known as a wit only to a small circle of eccentric friends, had reached his mid-forties without achieving any kind of fame or affluence. He was unhappily married, bored with parish duties and ill-equipped to climb the ecclesiastical greasy pole, but his talents were finally being ...”

“... a material level. Césaire’s view of Martinique was a product of his birth into the island’s small Black middle class, distinct from its mixed-race (Mulâtre) and White middle classes. His parents – Fernand, the manager of a sugar plantation, and Eléonore, a seamstress – saw education as a route to social mobility. Fernand subjected his children to ...”

“... a wide range of artists and writers, including the charismatic sculptor and Bloomsbury habitué Stephen Tomlin, and the novelist David Garnett, whose publishing connections were to prove invaluable. Now in her late twenties, Warner was hungry for new experiences. In July 1922, while she was browsing in the cheap section of Whiteley’s Department Store in ...”