“... the consolations of an essential self. There never was such a thing, for Barthes any more than for David Hume, and we are doubtless all the better for it. What looks like a loss is actually a liberation. Unity is an illusion, and consistency is more a vice than a virtue. Postmodernism is full of personality cults, but they know themselves to be ...”

“... offstage, and a chorus (of local women) speaking blindly of freedom for the ‘seed of Atreus’. David Kovacs, another recent translator of Euripides’ Orestes, tells us the play was ‘immensely popular in antiquity’, but this fact only increases his puzzlement, which he shares with Carson. ‘This most baffling play,’ Kovacs says, ‘has a plot that ...”

“... own version of what the project entailed. Not that Pagden’s account is itself cartoonish; the grand architecture of his argument is finely ornamented with nuance and qualification. Indeed, far from exaggerating the novelty of his cosmopolitan Enlightenment, Pagden locates its roots in Europe’s classical inheritance, or to be more exact, in the interplay ...”

“... satire and sentiment’. The shape of that sentiment became increasingly clear. In a eulogy for David Foster Wallace, who killed himself in 2008, Saunders explained his friend’s accomplishment in terms that made it hard not to imagine he was also describing his own aspirations: ‘Something about the prose itself was inducing a special variety of openness ...”

“... boring Arsenal. Even when they won, they were losers.In 1989, while coaching Monaco, Wenger met David Dein, the Arsenal vice chairman. Wenger went to an Arsenal match and after the game shared a cigarette with a friend of Barbara Dein, David’s wife. He was invited to their house in Totteridge, North London, for supper ...”

“... where such things are more likely to occur. (Two modern editions of the Requiem – those of David Wulstan and Bruno Turner – try to correct the offending octaves in the Benedictus but in doing so introduce two sets of consecutive fifths. It would have been better to leave Victoria with his momentary slip, as Rees does in his new online edition of the ...”

“... ruthlessness in those pursuits. The Oxford first in History, accomplished with the guidance of David Hogarth, later a senior archaeological colleague, then a fellow officer, included a study of Crusader castles done in the field, which involved an examination of the Syrian citadel, Krak des Chevaliers, then little-known in Britain. This suggests ...”

“... to be put through antic paces. In such poems I am reminded of Hamburger’s friends, Edwin Muir, David Gascoyne, Vernon Watkins and Robert Francis, poets whose common styles share the knowledge of what words have gone through. What such knowledge proposes is patience, certainly not the petulance in which Hamburger indulges himself when the bad humour takes ...”

“... vituperation was sustained by, among others, a retired member of the Burmese Civil Service named David Alec Wilson, who sent forth a six-volume corrective to Froude which Kaplan rightly calls ‘a historical grotesquerie, a mass of undigested and unevaluated documentation whose main purpose was to prove that Carlyle was a saint and Froude a liar’. It took ...”

“... heir. By the time he was being lined up as Mary’s husband, he had completed a three-year grand tour of his father’s territories, and had already been married and widowed. His father negotiated his new marriage contract without telling him. Politically, the match had a great deal to recommend it. The other European superpower of the 16th ...”

“... 1970s from the confluence of the Iranian revolution, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Camp David Accords and the 1979 siege of Makkah. Like al-Qaida before it, IS sought the eventual destruction of the Saudi monarchy. But IS and the Sauds have things in common. Both were determined to act against apostasy and heresy; both insisted on the dangers of ...”

“... 1968. He won the Prix Goncourt in 1978 for Rue des boutiques obscures, and in 1996 was awarded the Grand Prix National des Lettres for his work as a whole. He has become the object of a modestly growing academic industry. I take the quotations from Modiano with which I began (and a couple of later ones) from Alan Morris’s sensible book Patrick ...”

“... and give highly exaggerated accounts of Muslim antisemitism and collaboration (the Palestinian grand mufti of Jerusalem during the British Mandate, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, figures prominently here, as he does in Netanyahu’s speeches). While immigration has provoked widespread anger in Germany and helped foster the rise of the far-right AfD, the presence ...”

“... poets to play the role of politicians; it was they who had formulated demands and programmes. His grand quarrel with the idée reçue of Poland was thus, in particular, a quarrel with the romantic poets. Norwid rejected their exaltation of the national question into an absolute, their insistence on the priority of the collective – the nation – over the ...”

“... best architect alive in England’. There continues to be a great deal of motoring to luncheon at grand houses. The Second World War saw the requisitioning of stately homes, the introduction of heavy taxation and the disappearance of domestic service. But the National Trust’s Country Houses Scheme made only modest progress because owners were unable or ...”