“... Poems of Walter de la Mare, published in 1969, runs to almost nine hundred pages and includes more than a thousand poems. Of these William Wootten has culled 48, plus an extract from the late, long poem Winged Chariot. Each is followed by an astute and informative commentary that braids together relevant facts from de la Mare’s life, extracts from his ...”

“... across a continent has a certain raffish hilarity to it and once produced a study called Dylan Thomas in America. This book is a sort of ‘Dylan Thomas in Africa’, with the difference that Breytenbach has written this one himself and cares about the continent he’s travelling through and getting drunk in. As he ...”

“... 19th-century audiences by playing patriotic tunes on xylophones – have limited appeal. More than 200 councils have banned circuses featuring animals from their parks. But circus is moving away from the big top. Circus schools offer vocational courses and circus acts entertain at street and music festivals, motor shows and corporate events. The New ...”

“... the money to do so in some style. As he said, he was there because ‘I simply prefer Samoa.’ More particularly, he preferred the weather. Edinburgh, he had written in an early work, when he was still a prisoner in the city, has ‘one of the vilest climates under heaven ... The weather is raw and boisterous in winter, shifty and ungenial in summer, and a ...”

“... their lives make excellent biographies. Not only do they suffer in a dramatic way: they do it more purposefully than the rest of us, with our dull sense of un-satisfactoriness, can manage. Sequences of chaos and catastrophe in the life of an artist maudit, which to an eye-witness must appear so messy, pointless and wasteful, are revealed by the historical ...”

“... set of characters. Individuals are portrayed in all their idiosyncrasy, but are made to represent more than themselves. Things are at once unique and exemplary. A belatedly flowering example of the species is The Leopard, in which the slow decay of a Sicilian nobleman coincides with the clamorous rise of bourgeois Italy. In a series of works over the past ...”

“... Contemporary biologists who write for the general public usually have more to impart than scientific information. They have lessons to teach us about how to think of ourselves and our relation to the universe. This is not surprising, since biology is pervaded by Darwin’s theory of evolution, and the significance of that theory for our self-understanding remains largely unassimilated ...”

“... with the concept of dignity. But Waldron has an important argument to make, which applies even more sharply to the ideological pandemonium of the United States than to the relatively civilised conflicts of British politics. He believes that the defining ‘circumstances of politics’ are such as to make the legislature, and not the courts, the appropriate ...”

“... possible circumstance to what one wants to happen universally is not a logical one, for there is more than one way of combining such preferences: simple maximisation of expected satisfaction, counting all the possibilities as equally probable, may not be the right choice even for an individual. But more important, the move ...”

“... down Down with Skool! and cry with laughter’, and he first read it when he was ‘probably no more than ten or eleven’. So I suppose I ought to say at this point that I didn’t read it when I was at school, and reading it now I don’t find it hilarious, though it is sometimes funny. People who did read it at school probably think I’m missing the ...”

“... pulling a Virginia Slim from a cigarette packet, that really left an impression. No man was ever more deliberate, from the way he lit and held that cigarette, and followed it with another, to the cock of his head and the play of his eyebrows and his wide mouth, which said much that he declined to put into words. But the thing I carried away at the end of two ...”

“... the night, and that the sound of a motorway is ‘calming’, a ‘soft rush’ rather than the more predictable roar, is a gloomy prospect. Anna is not unlike Katharine. The narrator of The Love of Stones is at one point even mistaken for a tax inspector. Both women are loners; each has a more conventional sister from ...”

“... and feeding tubes, or ask for terminal sedation. Evidently, the same end could often be achieved more quickly and effectively by a lethal injection, so the value of the patient’s well-being does not draw a ‘bright line’ between assisted death and other measures. If we turn to the value of autonomy, we do find a difference. The currently recognised ...”

“... the wellspring of benevolent action and the glue of society (Adam Smith). There were no qualities more admirable ‘than beneficence and humanity … or whatever proceeds from a tender sympathy with others’ (David Hume). Fashionable poems deplored slavery and child labour, and wrung tears from the public on behalf of the distressed. Sterne assured his ...”

“... observable organism with a complex biological and social history and a name. But to yourself, more intimately, you appear as ‘I’, the mental subject of your experiences, thoughts, feelings, memories and emotions. This inner self is only indirectly observable by others, though they ordinarily have no doubt about its existence, as you have no doubt ...”