“... a poet is always willing to ‘let be’, he is merely the spirit’s celebrant. An erotic poet may respect the object in itself, but it is not characteristic of him to do so, and beyond the point of acknowledgment the only relevant spirit is his own and he is never willing to let be ... the object has helped him to define his power, and he is tender toward ...”

“... the best essay in the book, his fine celebration of Nabokov, has a kind of aural clatter: ‘I may also seem to be saying that if Lolita, the supreme novel of love in the 20th century, is a parody of earlier love novels, we should not be surprised, since love itself – the very love you and I experience in real life – is also a parody of earlier novels ...”

“... Grizzly Brown and all comers at the who-can-turn-over-most-cars-in-sixty-seconds contest. It may be only at the level of Raquel Welch, the leather bikini and One Million Years BC, but Old Norse literature and mythology has made its mark on European and American culture to an extent far greater than any other medieval corpus. Its stories are probably more ...”

“... friends and kinsfolk, urging them to pray for her soul, her departed spirit. Such printed pieties may well seem sentimental to outsiders – rather like the halting rhymes we find in the ‘In Memoriam’ columns of newspapers. After reporting the death of this young mother, the birth of this child, Yourcenar embarks on a ‘tour of the chateaux’, the ...”

“... whatever levers and steam-engines we have at hand, cant over the sperm whale’s head, that it may lie bottom up; then, ascending by a ladder to the summit, have a peep down the mouth; and were it not that the body is now completely separated from it, with a lantern we might descend into the great Kentucky Mammoth Cave of his stomach. But let us hold on ...”

“... successor, James I and VI, wanted to rule by proclamation; it was so in 2010 when Theresa May wanted to use the royal prerogative to bypass Parliament; it was still so in 2017 when it was proposed that the UK leave the EU by ministerial fiat rather than parliamentary authority, and again in 2019 when Elizabeth II was required by Boris Johnson to ...”

“... journals end up taking a lot on trust. Even diligent reviewing is inconsistent, since reviewers may disagree about a paper’s merits, and will have their own intellectual and social biases.In Science Fictions, Stuart Ritchie explores the problems with this system. The book is a useful account of ten years or more of debate, mostly in specialist ...”

“... and constant reinvention. Her use of Cuban government sources and official state data may deter some readers, as may her unabashed support for the Cuban model. But part of her argument is that, to a degree not really seen elsewhere, Cuban citizens are the state. For We Are Cuba! she interviewed government ...”

“... various flattering things about my own work, albeit hinting in the politest possible terms that I may be a touch benighted.)In North’s view, ‘the origins of the discipline’ are to be found in the 1920s: he repeatedly asserts that it was I.A. Richards who ‘founded the discipline’. But Richards, according to North, did not develop practical criticism ...”

“... of historical interpretation: ‘the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come.’ In Alias Grace – a profoundly disconcerting story of obsession, set in Ontario in the early 19th century, and based on an actual murder case ...”

“... for this sort of role. If they can give the appearance of aliveness and yet not disappoint, they may have an advantage over human beings as a kind of ‘spare part’, and open new possibilities for narcissistic experience with machines. From this point of view, relational artefacts make a certain amount of sense as successors to the always more resistant ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... serendipitously. No, it is Keiller’s praxis that defines what the films are, and while he may disavow the notion that they create a revolutionary new space, I believe the increasingly rhapsodic reception they have received over the years from members of ‘the current tendency’ speaks of their success in achieving exactly this. The ‘peculiar ...”

“... around 10 o’clock we all retire to bed. – I am now bearing up quite well under this regimen: I may even intensify it.That Wagner managed to do any work at all (apart from quelling insubordination) is a miracle. His obsession with water dominates all his operas – Tristan, the Ring, the Dutchman and Parsifal especially – and has to be considered as much ...”

“... 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 ...”