“... to pay his legal costs when he was sued by the incurably litigious Lord Alfred Douglas. Edward Thomas was devoted to him. John Masefield drank claret with him at teatime as they sang sea shanties together in Ransome’s mother’s kitchen. And Ransome took to most people; he was not choosy. In fact, he was inclined to instant and lasting hero worship from ...”

“... of retellings: one mythographer has an immortal Helen marry Achilles in the Underworld, while Thomas Heywood describes her killing herself for her sad grey hairs. Maguire has kept her survey within bounds by setting aside the political uses of Helen of Troy, even though these flourished in the Elizabethan period; she has also set aside the dramatic or ...”

“... to try to smooth things over, and has promised moderately enhanced tax-raising and spending powers for Scotland, but they are unlikely to be enough. Something else will have to give. What will it be? One obvious possibility is the electoral system itself. I said that the United Kingdom is currently more or less ungovernable, but really it’s only ...”

“... have intensified with the coming of digital and cybernetic technologies and their extraordinary powers of reproduction and animation; animators keep refining their techniques in order to conceal their use. The author of The Erotic Doll must be cursing his bad luck that he finished his book before the current show at the Hayward Gallery, The Human Factor ...”

“... a creation of the later Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, and like them it had almost magical powers. Antiquarians claimed they could speak to the dead; magi claimed they could call them back to life; and indexes genuinely showed the reader where to find exemplary figures doing great things, as well as what they had said and written on any given ...”

“... a way out of terminal ennui.The saints and their wild doings, the angels and their extraordinary powers, now mischievously recorded by Eliot Weinberger, may have helped enliven the days assigned to them. The strangeness of such religious material again and again makes it incomprehensible that such figures should be considered holy, but if you look instead at ...”

“... in Proust. But something else was bubbling, his own eros, and success came to be measured by his powers of seduction as well as his academic prowess. Dustan kept on cruising men (and dating women) even after enrolling at the elite École Nationale d’Administration in 1988: ‘I didn’t want to blow my chances. I was made to succeed. To have a beautiful ...”

“... No American novelist​ has devoted as much energy as Percival Everett to the proper noun, its powers as engine, instrument and index. Towards the end of Percival Everett by Virgil Russell (first published in 2013), a story about storytelling in which nobody is called Percival Everett or Virgil Russell, one of the narrators gives a list of 516 gerunds that encompass the whole of human activity ...”

“... urban labourers or his opposition to American imperialism.)Until recently, Democrats celebrated Thomas Jefferson as the party’s founder, though the author of the Declaration of Independence has fallen into disfavour because of his ownership of slaves. But as Kazin makes clear, the party of the early republic that elected Jefferson to two terms as ...”

“... position as the Government Critic, ‘the head of the literary police’. While not exercising the powers of Count Benkendorf in Russia, who was to control and paternalise the genius of Pushkin, Gifford and others like him were indeed powerful agents for the forces of reaction; and they were hypocrites too, because they never admitted what Hazlitt rightly ...”

“... Britten at 22, expressing opinions he never wholly gave up. Even some of those who recognised his powers would reproach him for his foreign ‘cleverness’ and urge him to behave more like an English composer. Much later he recorded Elgar’s ‘Introduction and Allegro’, and The Dream of Gerontius with Pears, so it might be argued that he allowed himself ...”

“... holds a special niche permanently vacant for those bookish old ranters (Michael Foot, Norman Thomas) who can qualify for that sort of affectionate obituary even while they are still alive, the paradox of the traditionalist rebel does not automatically connote charm or breadth of mind. In the Puritan revolutions of old, and the Islamic ones of ...”

“... almost exclusively at the power politics of theocracy, except for a few eccentrics such as Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty. Theocratic failure and national defeat took place before the first signs of intellectual innovation. The most interesting 17th-century forerunner of the 18th-century efflorescence is Stair, whose Institutions captivate by their simple ...”

“... and persistence of the satire that undercut the successive fashions in chivalric enthusiasm. Thomas Love Peacock’s Mr Chainmail in Crotchet Castle, ‘a good-looking young gentleman ... with very antiquated taste’, who ‘holds that the best state of society was that of the 12th century, when nothing was going forward but fighting, feasting and ...”

“... of criminal guilt,’ Trombley writes. The comment has the fashionable aura of R.D. Laing, Thomas Szasz and Michel Foucault, but although he makes vague gestures at all three, Trombley does not seem to comprehend the implications of their arguments. For what follows from his comparison of madness and crime is the conclusion that Virginia Woolf should ...”