“... weeks ago – though, of course, I heard bits and scraps’. The letter is dated 1627, so there may be a joke here rather than an error. Still, I don’t think we need to see Joyce as being disingenuous – David Greetham wonders about this in an essay in a booklet accompanying the new edition of Finnegans Wake – since we know what he could do with bits ...”

“... loyal translation:        So Plotinus teaches us in his books, which are nine. It may be that our brief life is the fleeting reflection of the divine. Or in the following lamentable lines, which sound like an authentic invitation to return to the economy (and the poetry) of prose: En un confín del vasto Sur persiste esa alta cosa, vagamente ...”

“... criticism of Leibniz would not be tolerated. The committee responsible for the 1755 competition may have hoped to avoid trouble by changing the subject to Pope’s Essay on Man, but if so they were mistaken. The jury was dominated by a group of Leibnizians who had secretly promised victory to one of their friends, but their scheme collapsed when one of them ...”

“... crystal ball, sky and a sky, and sky, and sky, till death – Well – death and the void may be part of it. City parks by night do have something sepulchral about them. The little white blobs of the streetlamps in Winter Evening don’t seem to be holding off January’s chill. But look again at the painting … My language so far has betrayed its ...”

“... a third term into a situation that otherwise consists of but two opposing forces’. Permissions may need to be negotiated, subjects and audiences invited to consent: ‘This freedom is important … If you choose to abandon ship, you can then ponder the classic question. Did I fail the work, or did it fail me?’ The argument of the book itself enacts this ...”

“... will of their own: if we have been ‘very much discompos’d’ by an insult, for instance, they may make us waste the rest of the day finding ‘a hundred subjects of discontent’ in every innocuous thing we encounter. The general point was illustrated with a story borrowed from Montaigne: ‘The case of a man, who being hung out from a high tower in a ...”

“... hundreds of miles to the south-west, in the Bay of Bengal. The monsoon season usually starts in May, as the land heats up faster than the ocean and the colder, higher-pressure air blows in from the sea (the same thing happens on a much, much smaller scale in Torquay or Scarborough on warm summer mornings), bringing storm clouds and heavy ...”

“... in any case can’t be sure Chaucer committed. So my dark suspicions about the genre of biography may be rather self-serving. Not all literary biography fits the rubric of popular history. Some of it appeals more to the submerged fantasist, hoarder of dangerous titbits, or amateur detective. Merkin enjoys Panthea Reid’s account of Woolf as a guilty ...”

“... is not and has never been humanly feasible.’ ‘At home – chez soi – one is a potentate; one may grant an outsider relief from the outside; and this must be what I yearn for.’ ‘I think that what I’ve wanted, most of all, is someone nice and safe to hang out with.’ Plus, despite his failure to reproduce with Jenn, ‘I have always wanted ...”

“... so that we can learn lessons’.* It offers a long and painful account of an episode that may come to be seen as marking the moment when the UK fell off its global perch, trust in government collapsed and the country turned inward and began to disintegrate. When the report was published I was outside the Queen Elizabeth II Centre in the shadow of ...”

“... journals have to be printed and distributed. Peer reviewers and the editorial boards of journals may not be paid, but designers, typesetters and copy editors are. Elsevier, the world’s biggest publisher of journals, employs 16,000 editors. Still, no matter how generously you spin it, the numbers tell their own story: in 2015, Elsevier reported profits of ...”

“... end, when Bridge turned to Michael Murray, who had sat silently throughout the proceedings. ‘You may think,’ he told the jury, ‘that Murray’s conduct in this trial has shown a certain measure of dignity totally absent from the conduct of his co-defendants. You may find yourself in difficulty in withholding a certain ...”

“... all these files contain secret portraits: women or men seen as others see them. These portraits may be the result of years of painstaking, insanely minute watching and eavesdropping by one or several security teams. Almost always, much of their detail comes from informers. Some informers won’t be identifiable. Some ...”

“... the Whips and Big Brothers of Leinster House’. He received a crushingly low number of votes. In May that year he tried to get references for a job as assistant lecturer in English at Trinity College Dublin. Later he applied for a junior lecturer post at Trinity, and then for a job in the student records office: I am an honours graduate and hold the degree ...”

“... its gravitational pull’.As a way of thinking about translation this isn’t as outré as it may sound. In fact, it’s natural enough: the Latin term translatio is the equivalent of the Greek μεταφορά (‘metaphorá’) and both mean ‘carrying across’. Rope tricks of various kinds have for centuries been part of the armoury of metaphors used ...”