“... obsession – the gorgeous, disorienting, sometimes repellent phenomenon known as outsider art. It may be that anything in which one becomes absorbed produces its ready share of ambivalence: that objects of fixation trouble as much as they arouse. Certainly, that would seem to be true in my case. Strange fits of passion have I known – a carload of them ...”

“... evacuation: the poet, he says, in the second ‘Lettre du voyant’, written to Paul Demeny in mid-May 1871, must drain ‘all the poisons within him and [keep] only their essences’. The radicalism he had in mind, moreover, was that of the voyou/voyant or wide-boy/seer. He was finished, says Rickword in a briskly undemocratic tone, with ‘the tawdry virtues ...”

“... that to have insight into oneself was a prerequisite for a patient in psychoanalysis. Achilles may not be able to see to the bottom of his own mind, but at least he’s trying to get an angle on it: he knows he’s got a problem he can’t solve himself and he can now take the step of asking someone else to help him look – and why not a disinterested ...”

“... spared the worst effects of winter. But, as with depopulation, we are getting a glimpse of what may be to come. South Korea serves as a demographic warning to the rest of the world, in the way that, say, the Maldives does for climate change. These are the places where we can see what will happen if and when the waters close over our heads.Depopulation is at ...”

“... defects-invisible,shining in the eyes’ charm, the paternal loveand fidelity charm, the song of may-he-know-you-for-his-own,and most of all the beloved, be calm; you are safe, you are mine.We’d know these songs in whatever language they were sung.She wouldn’t put the infant down, kept tuckingthe cloths in round his head. No good.He rarely showed an ...”

“... is Life!’ you keep telling us. So if we cook it right, that is, with care, and luck, it may give us all a taste for truth. At last you’re silent, intently dozing on the wing. They will not forget you, your friends on the island here (it’s just a small place, far off in Europe, remember ... no longer of any great consequence); and won’t forget ...”

“... why would man ‘A’ be a Manet, And man ‘B’ be a Monet, manner and all? Manet and Monet may be nothing but manners, But what manners! What Monets! What need there be more? What’s money? What’s Manet? It’s Manets that matter: The way that their matter is made to have meaning, Manually, maddeningly, matter-of-factly. What matters is ...”

“... is fast receding into the dark Back of time. My father (born October, 1934, died The last day of May, 2007) kept his medal in a safe Cleverly hidden in the utility room. The institutions that formed him, bade him don A tin hat at Suez, shimmer like elegant, gauzy backdrops Floating down from the flies. He wept Rarely, ate powdered egg through gritted teeth ...”

“... issue the call to prayer. ‘Once you scrutinise you will always find something, however small it may be,’ the anonymous author of the Trojan Horse letter wrote. ‘By that time the damage is done.’ Michael Gove had already vented his views on sinister Islamic plots in 2006, in his book Celsius 7/7: ‘There are many Muslims across the globe, within ...”

“... choking alone. The reader’s urge to rerun the story in order to repair the intolerable injustice may be embarrassing and damaging too.Racing ahead of other threats – including syphilis, the mercury that Keats had prescribed himself to treat the syphilis, and the extreme anxiety caused by the mercury – tuberculosis was destroying Keats. His doctors (some ...”

“... mood. There was too much yellow For my temperature to rise a lot At sunset into new mays and may nots: I was afraid to see the ever dancelike Breast of cloud swirl open in the sky As my garments. Promising a son, To him, to memory, I could not love His love, and all that came after Was a mere continuation of that August night I waited out the rain In ...”

“... more than her share of misogynistic sex-baiting and condescension. Yet in some uneasy degree one may also sympathise with Hutchins’s first critics. There is something peculiar about the novelist’s erotic preoccupations, her almost queasy-making interest in the sensations of embodiment. Witness the first paragraphs of Victorine, the best of the eight, now ...”

“... the position of the pro-Europeans in Belgrade looked shaky. In almost every forecast for the 11 May election the nationalist Radical Party (SRS) stood a very good chance of forming a government. A few days before the vote, people in the capital watched the streets fill with Radical supporters, fresh off the buses, heading for a downtown rally, their blue ...”

“... from his fellow MPs (which he would have been unable to do), and three days after Theresa May had become prime minister. When I arrived at Broadcasting House for the start of the march, a few hundred people were gathered around a speaker from the UK wing of Black Lives Matter, orating into a megaphone. There were people selling the papers you always ...”

“... in all political action and about the ‘diabolical powers’ intrinsic to politics, which may warp a leader beyond recognition. He is sharp too on the subject of vanity, a cardinal sin in a politician, and its dependent disorders, lack of responsibility and lack of objectivity. Weber’s is a prescription for heroes; I wonder if any politician could ...”