“... exchange is between Rhiannon and Gwen, wife of Malcolm, who was once in love with Rhiannon though Peter was much more so, so much so that she had to have an abortion in consequence. The two are talking in Gwen’s kitchen, where ‘with a small start Rhiannon noticed that the bottle of white wine on the table in front of her was not the same as the one they ...”

“... sharply aware of a world outside books. Even when wrong, he was sensible. This was the man whom James Loeb, a retired banker and huge benefactor of cultural causes and institutions, appointed in 1910 co-editor of his new Classical Library. His aim, Loeb wrote, in his prefatory ‘Word’ in the first 20 volumes, published in 1912, was to remedy the failure ...”

“... All these will be gathered, sorted and reclothed in flesh. Jacopus da Voragine imagines the martyr James the Dismembered sweetly apostrophising his body as he is tortured: ‘Go third toe, to thy companions, and as the grain of wheat bears much fruit, so shalt thou rest with thy fellows unto the last day ... Be comforted, little toe, because great and small ...”

“... but only in passing, and only because of the fascination with it of such Hollywood stars as James Dean and Steve McQueen. Racing appears the most absurd outgrowth of our fascination with the car: drivers hurtle around in circles, at the limits of adhesion. Some lose control and end up dead, mutilated or crippled. And yet it’s one of the most ...”

“... story was strangely precarious. Although his Two Treatises were published in 1689, they were, as Peter Laslett showed in the 1950s, largely written before it, in the context of the Exclusion Crisis of 1679 to 1681. In the wake of the largely imaginary fears aroused by the Popish Plot of 1678, English Whigs under the leadership of Shaftesbury unsuccessfully ...”

“... Labour dispatched MPs and ministers to Hull, including Tony Benn, Tony Crosland, George Brown and James Callaghan. The newly appointed minister for transport, Barbara Castle, spoke at a meeting on 18 January. The story that passed into popular memory in Hull is that Castle promised to build a bridge across the Humber without really understanding what she was ...”

“... a pig’s back). We stare out along the coast to Tory Island, the home of the great naive painter, James Dixon. Below us Donegal is green, still, silent and peaceful. I’m too tired that evening to open either Himself Alone or The Idiot, and in any case I want to a make a start on a new book, a collection of short essays on single poems. I wish I’d packed a ...”

“... To William Henley he was ‘more the spoiled child than it is possible to say’. Henry James loved his writing – and loved mincing around its shortcomings – but saw him as ‘an indispensable light’. To others he appeared like a wraith or a tramp or a bag of bones, a hollow-eyed, coughing wretch. Henry Adams thought he looked like ‘an ...”

“... body, and eyebrows are being raised. ‘What sort of history is the history of the body?’ asks Peter Biller in a recent review, voicing scepticism about the genre itself: even ‘a moderate example of body history’, he concludes, ‘can principally incarnate a certain blindness towards the past.’ Do academics feel similarly hesitant about studying more ...”

“... of the standing critical wisdom. Many of his former antagonists have now moved to what William James thought of as the third phase in the assimilation of a threatening new idea. First they said it was absurd, then that it was peripheral, now they want to claim it as their own creation. So Bloom has in a sense won his battle. In doing so, he may have ...”

“... the centuries for which the work has been read. In any case, the present exhaustive survey by Peter Field has surely put paid to the Matthew thesis, the Kittredge denial and the Lewis exculpation all together: it is no longer possible to say, in chorus or separately, ‘it wasn’t him, it never happened, and anyway he did right.’ We are left instead ...”

“... all his life – Hampden, Swift, Hazlitt, Cobden, Bright, Mill, Gladstone, Wilberforce and Charles James Fox. There was, in time, one great socialist addition to the pantheon, Aneurin Bevan. It followed that politics was mainly about two things: standing up for moral principle and making wonderful speeches. Any idea that it was also about perks and patronage ...”

“... to want wholeheartedly, and he becomes one of those characters so frequent in Wharton and Henry James, the man to whom nothing has happened, who has missed his whole life, as if it was an opera he was too late for. Day-Lewis brings to this part a wonderful, tired, feeble charm, creates a perfect sense of how attractive and hopeless Newland is: subtle enough ...”

“... Telegraph, Norman Tebbit appears as a crazed, bloodthirsty infantryman, with Douglas Hurd and Peter Walker mounted behind him, apparently duetting the Iron Duke’s quip: ‘I don’t know what effect he will have upon the enemy, but, by God, he terrifies me.’ Garland’s cartoon is derivative and poorly executed (it has nothing to feast the eye), but ...”

“... Syriac and Aramaic, with Latin translations, printed in Antwerp between 1568 and 1573; or John James Audubon’s Birds of America (1827-38) with its 435 hand-coloured, life-size prints; or The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer printed in 1896 at William Morris’s Kelmscott Press (‘a pocket cathedral’, according to Edward Burne-Jones); or Mr William ...”