“... of P&S slightly. Now there is room to show greats like Picasso struggle, and less-greats like Paul Signac shine. (The decision to begin with his wild Neo-Impressionist portrait of the debonair critic Félix Fénéon caused much consternation: that’s how fetishised the presentation had become.) One effect is to ease the expectation that every work be ...”

“... for a page or so, this arguable but highly contestable assertion – contested in particular by Paul Hamilton – about the main crux in Coleridge’s most important critical work, is never returned to, explained, argued for, and the problems it involves never acknowledged. Equally oddly, Holmes’s account of these definitions, which magically unified the ...”

“... him, but he ‘moved steadily on, his face set towards the dark city, where the children of God lay sleeping’. In her teens, as well as reading Poe, O’Connor spent much time toiling over linoleum-block cartoons, and it was as a cartoonist that she made a name for herself at Georgia State College for Women, where she was art editor of the school ...”

“... us Walter Benjamin’s image of the writer’s bed as ‘the summit of a scaffold on which Proust lay flat, holding his manuscript above him, his face pressed against the upper reaches of his imagination’. Proust’s father, a doctor, was a fresh-air fiend; there is probably another book to be written about how the sick and quasi-sick relate to their ...”

“... moment in the Inferno when Paolo and Francesca share ‘a kiss both looked-for and unbidden’ (in Paul Batchelor’s translation) as they read. That’s another thing: Smith’s literariness comes through here as something more amusing; fragments with titles such as ‘Speak, radio’ and ‘Brideshead unvisited’ open up the story to give a parallel ...”

“... defined groups: administrators, academics and fee-paying students. The origins of this arrangement lay in 19th-century Berlin, and Humboldt University, founded in 1810 in the aftermath of Napoleon’s conquest of Prussia. The African university makes its appearance later in the 19th century. At the southern end of the continent, colleges were started from ...”

“... towards the young Jewish state, but made its reservations plain. In an article published in 1958, Paul Ricoeur challenged the claims of André Neher, a fellow contributor to L’Esprit, that the accession of Jews to biblical lands anchored an ‘essence’ of Jewishness. ‘Is this essence you invoke,’ Ricoeur asked Neher, ‘which in your view founds your ...”

“... handsome, as became clear in the arguments fifty years ago about how much grime to wash off St Paul’s. The contrast on a bright day between the dirty-grey south portico of St George’s, which was cleaned decades ago, and the stark black and white of the untouched south face of the tower suggests that the clear picture one now has of the portico’s ...”

“... troops he commanded from beating the Russians to Berlin, though he cannot help noting that Berlin lay deep inside what had been agreed as the Soviet zone of occupation. Charles Whiting claims melodramatically that Karl Timmerman, the US officer who captured that famous bridge over the Rhine at Remagen which the Germans had failed to blow up, settled our ...”

“... buried beneath an excess of facts. It’s the first reflex of the con man, the bullshitter, to lay down a smokescreen of names, dates, addresses. Bore the interrogator into submission. Given all that weight of evidence, frequently offered in the language of a statement to the police (‘Moreover ...’), imaginative revisions of the fabulist tendency will ...”

“... and seemed oblivious of the rain … He continued his sightless walk, sloshing through pools that lay here and there on the grass, then crunching his way over the gravel in the direction of the clump of lavender planted by his wife ‘before she died’. At the lavender he froze into an attitude of despair. A little later Rover struggled up and under the ...”

“... out with the hermeneutic bathwater was disabused. Philistinism or superiority, for her, lay in the quality of mind manifested in one’s sensuous reaction. If you couldn’t think – think well, think quickly, think like Sontag – then you didn’t feel. One comes with mixed feelings to the personal journals that Sontag kept diligently but did not ...”

“... like Brandt, were German. The spread of TB was one of the legacies of the First World War. As Paul Delany tells us, in Germany TB sufferers doubled in number in the last two years of the war, when ‘soap disappeared completely, and the streetcars were foul with the distinctive stench of famine.’ Rolf Brandt, Willy’s younger brother,would later talk ...”

“... By creating an ‘emerging market’ from a decrepit state-owned petroleum industry, the war would lay the foundations for something dear to the hearts of the Washington cabal: an end to (other people’s) economic nationalism and producer cartels. In this ideological universe, oil figured centrally, since oil had remained one of the Third World’s most ...”

“... righteous community and its superiority over the savages surrounding them. But some of them still lay awake at night, as Mary Rowlandson did, reflecting on her past torments and ‘the awful dispensation of the Lord towards us’.A sanitised version of the captivity narrative, shorn of Rowlandson’s reflections, became the official story of post-9/11 ...”