“... divorce. As he wrote in Love and Exile, ‘I had made up my mind a long time ago that the creative powers of literature lie not in the forced originality produced by variations of style and word machinations but in the countless situations life keeps creating, especially in the queer complications between man and woman. For the writer, they are potential ...”

“... his career was a slippery mixture of principled conviction and clever accommodation to the ruling powers. There is a curious moment in his preface where he goes out of his way to assert that Virgil was ‘still of republican principles in his heart’. He then contrives to make Augustus sound like a constitutional monarch and so edges a step closer to the new ...”

“... Party, and of the Archbishop’s energetic cultivation of his standing among the non-aligned powers. Plans worked out by the former Secretary of State Dean Acheson would have provided for another bargain between Greeks and Turks over the heads of the two Cypriot communities, under which most of the island would have gone to Greece, with some protection ...”

“... Until the 17th century this country remained, in this respect, on the fringe of Europe. Then Thomas Gataker, who turned down the Mastership of Trinity, practised critical scholarship in his commentary on Marcus Aurelius, and John Pearson, an eminent theologian, who was successively Master of Jesus, Master of Trinity and Bishop of Chester, displayed it in ...”

“... in the early summer of 1933 …’ Sebald borrowed this habit of repetitive attribution from Thomas Bernhard, who also influenced Sebald’s diction of extremism. Almost every sentence in this book is a cunning combination of the quiet and the loud: ‘As usual when I go down to London on my own,’ the narrator tells us in a fairly typical passage, ‘a ...”

“... Then there’s Doctor Reichhardt, the artist imprisoned for his ideals, but he is more of a Thomas Mann-style grand bourgeois. Perhaps the multiple self-portraits make sense: there’s always more than one Hans Fallada. In Fallada’s 1942 memoir, Damals bei uns daheim (Our Home in Days Gone By), he describes himself as a Pechvogel, an unlucky ...”

“... Here are the nominees for the greatest bad argument in political theory. They are: Thomas Hobbes, for Leviathan; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, for The Communist Manifesto; and Plato, for the Republic. Why them? Each of the candidates is hallowed as a Penguin Classic. Each has been foisted on freshman generations in Pol Phil 101 ...”

“... worked, for he could still borrow. He hated the conseil judiciaire with all his considerable powers of hatred, railing against the humiliation of being treated like an irresponsible minor; he blamed it, and those who’d forced it on him, for his spiralling debts and the poverty and squalor of his day-to-day existence, as he drifted from seedy hotel to ...”

“... up leaders it favours. Bongo père et fils were typical. So was Blaise Compaoré, who toppled Thomas Sankara – president of Burkina Faso, and still a hero for young West African opposition activists – in 1987. Sankara was murdered during the putsch and Compaoré went on to run the country for more than 25 years. After an uprising in 2014, French ...”

“... belief in the privilege and privacy of consciousness, or the Kantian belief in the constitutive powers of the ego. Foucault’s attack on the concept of man and on ‘humanism’ is a forceful way of saying that the subject is not given with permanent structures that condition reality, but produced historically from its social world. Moving away from ...”

“... by the doctrine of terra nullius. It was a case of first come, first served for the European powers, especially when the native inhabitants proved insufficiently organised (not recognisably human enough) to treat with. That they were not seen only made them more feared in the remote early settlements at Sydney Cove and elsewhere. Just what claims to ...”

“... almost wherever she went, for Graves these conflicts were evidence of her ineffable, otherworldly powers, ‘tourbillions in Time made’, as he once put it, ‘By the strong pulling of her bladed mind/Through that ever-reluctant element’. Riding’s own extraordinary poetry added to the mystique of her invulnerability; its severe abstract propositions ...”

“... his life to his work, as happens in Lowell or Berryman. Essentially Schwartz was, like Dylan Thomas, a dazzling phrasemaker. His first lines were usually his best, and these often became the poems’ titles: ‘Dogs are Shakespearean, Children are strangers’, ‘In the Naked Bed, in Plato’s Cave’, ‘The Beautiful American Word, Sure’. Phrases ...”

“... or sociologists. One giddying factor, though, was our dissatisfaction with the leading Communist powers – since both China and the Soviet Union seemed to be giving too little assistance to Vietnam, the land of burning children: when the liberalised government of Czechoslovakia was suppressed by Soviet troops, many left-wingers in Western Europe felt as if ...”

“... seems to have been happiest when being a chum to her admirers. After Bland’s death she married Thomas Tucker, Captain of the Woolwich ferry, who, Mrs Briggs explains, ‘had the vowels of a London waterman, however genuine his feelings’. The Tuckers adopted nautical jargon, brewed coffee in the Captain’s galley, and danced hornpipes. Nesbit, who said ...”