“... Until her mother meets her in her mouth again        and makes use of what I could not And may appear on my plate next year in a             castrated form as a rasher; until, via a reference to the role of pigs in the Eleusinian mysteries, the transition is made to the visionary:              In the butcher’s window The ...”

“... place beside the towel and the basin of water as an instrument of cleanliness or wholeness, and may therefore be regarded as an overt symbol of the Virgin’s purity.’ What Schapiro is doing here, by stressing the notion of an ‘overt symbol’, is to open our minds to the possibility that the alternatives are never simply either that objects are ...”

“... it merely seems to be asserting that the best journalism can be literature, and that a byline may be fleshed out into a participant. But its proponents do have one thing in common: a desire to have it both ways. They claim to be adding their imaginative insights to their reporter’s facts, to be moulding brute reality with artistry while never losing ...”

“... ensure that men are punished for their crimes, but since the punishment seldom comes quickly, and may fall not upon the guilty but upon their descendants, the resulting sequences of crime and punishment cannot often be perceived by human beings, so that the gods seem to men arbitrary and remote. Individual gods punish men who have refused them honour: thus ...”

“... modern sensibility.’ He cannot get over the idea of Thomas’s modern sensibility (whatever that may be exactly) and uses the phrase three times more in the same chapter. And his language becomes positively untrained: Thomas is ‘exquisitely sincere and sensitive’; his poems ‘seem to happen’. Yet as soon as he gets on to the Sitwells the cogency and ...”

“... such old words As I know you know. Inside the poem itself, the epigram as ‘two-line squib’ may rear its head as the poet’s own words address him: Just as I was swearing to abjure them all: ‘Perhaps you should say something A bit more interesting than what you mean.’ But even that piece of self-mockery escapes the epigram’s natural inclination ...”

“... without a dozen hitmen (book, TV, theatre) pumping lead into his vital parts. Charles Charming may have been the most exposed poem in history, but it may also turn out to have been the most comprehensively reviled (the Sunday Times went so far as to dub it ‘The Worst Poem of the Twentieth Century’). Thus, even in ...”

“... taken by Baxandall to indicate panelling must in fact have indicated pilasters (the base mouldings may be discerned above the lady’s hand in the colour plate of a detail of the painting which serves as the dust-jacket). That these pilasters were more evident once is suggested by Filloeul’s engraving, which he reproduces (although he only refers to it in ...”

“... a phenomenon deserving equal attention with Mussolini – a temperate judgment that the years may be thought to have vindicated. Art is at least as important as politics, whether in peace or war, and it is Pound’s intransigent conviction of this that brings out the philistine in others besides Peter Robinson. The statesman as artist – God knows it is ...”

“... entrance. These two foreign correspondents are used to witnessing military activity (you may remember Swain as a character in Roland Joffe’s movie, The Killing Fields), but they were astonished to see an armoured car with a full complement of Royal Marines apparently patrolling inside the heavily-fortified perimeter fence. Had Rupert Murdoch called ...”

“... present us with nearly irrefragable apologias, which also engage our sympathies. Characters may be put down, in argument or otherwise, but never suffer irreversible defeat or humiliation. By origin, tragedy – and probably comedy also – is a form based on ritual sacrifice and cruelty, and the oddity – maybe even sometimes the weakness – of ...”

“... in France during the first half of the 20th century, and also the extent to which Catholicism may be accommodated by any of these. Liberal, well-meaning Bertrand, of ‘an old but undistinguished’ Provencal family, with a manor house called St Théodore, has the Catholic faith in his blood and never dreams of renouncing any of its tenets, even when his ...”

“... ran it to death just to spite the Gentiles’. The picture of Namier which this scene discloses may appear entirely consonant with the resonances which ‘Namierism’ seems to have for those who have never read a word by or about the man himself: an animus against abstract ideas, sneers at intellectuals in politics, schadenfreude about the outcome of ...”

“... particularly in their treatment of quantum theory, where readers without some previous knowledge may lose the thread; certainly I did. But anyone prepared to make a serious effort will get some insight into what is happening. In this review, I aim to do three things. First, I will explain the new thermodynamics; here I will try to follow the ...”

“... in 1975), then his abilities should receive their just acknowledgment. Conversely, of course, Dahl may simply be on to a good thing which others might try: Charlie, he says, ‘grew from being a bedtime story told to my children’. Its eponymous hero, Charlie Bucket, lives in extreme poverty with his father, his mother and his four bed-ridden grandparents. He ...”