“... author was apparently familiar with the Wirral, wild territory at the time, we’re told, so he may have been an extremely gifted Merseysider. But Chaucer had the advantage of speaking the English of London, from which modern English descends. Gawain is linguistically a far tougher proposition, and only specialists can comfortably read it, so there already ...”

“... give the poet’s ego a foothold, allow it to preen itself on self-denial. Ceasing to prattle may suggest that Thomas wants to put away childish things, but his praying self is clearly still miffed – the phrase ‘frosty silence’ is hovering behind the flower simile – and unsatisfied with grown-up isolation. Ironically, the effect of God’s silence ...”

“... from a Chinese stationer in New York. Much of the novel takes place inside this notebook, which may make it rather too enclosed and precious for some tastes. Yet it is, authentically, about the writer’s fear of claustrophobia, of getting trapped inside the fictional magic lantern show. And Auster’s ability as an illusionist makes the story always ...”

“... as theft. An even earlier – possibly the earliest – propounding of the rule that finders may not be keepers is at the start of Book XI of Plato’s Laws, a work which discusses, in relentless detail, the laws that should govern an imaginary new colony to be founded on Crete. Under the general principle ‘Thou shalt not touch or move my possessions ...”

“... Alice Vavasor leaves her second love to go back to the first, her father says: ‘But you may change your mind again.’ Alice found that this was hard to bear and hard to answer; but there was a certain amount of truth in the grievous reproach conveyed in her father’s words, which made her bow her neck to it. ‘I have no right to say that it is ...”

“... city’s main tourist attraction. Dr Tom Coburn, Oklahoma’s Republican candidate for the Senate, may be the most conservative candidate in the country. ‘No one gets to the right of the guy,’ a supporter says. Coburn is against condoms, embryonic stem-cell research, gay rights and government spending; and he favours ‘the death penalty for ...”

“... Bank economist reliant on Ramallah’s figures admits. Even so, he says, unemployment rates in May dropped 3 per cent from a high of 32 per cent. ‘My tiler’s gone underground,’ a UN civil servant complained to me: he couldn’t compete with the tunnel smugglers, who pay four times the £12 daily wage he was offering. More tangible signs of recovery ...”

“... these two men have made is a carefully guarded refuge or a prison allowing no escape. Seclusion may have been a rational response in 1950s North Carolina: Wendell is aware of the prosecution of gay men, of the fact that he and Frank stand to lose a great deal if they are found out. But it’s frustrating that, in the novel, their isolation also has the ...”

“... to become cosmopolitan citizens of the world (and therefore ‘citizens of nowhere’ as Theresa May would say); a theological fear that the children of God are becoming lost in the secular void (as Theresa May might say). It’s also a political intuition worth taking seriously. A people has to know itself as such if it ...”

“... of his collection to his second wife, Margaret. If the woman in the painting was Margaret, Robert may well have wanted to remove her. As for the dish that came afterwards, perhaps it just didn’t look right or was too strong a reminder of the family’s Civil War losses (they had also been forced to hand over much of their silver plate to the ...”

“... is essential for any Shia-dominated government in Baghdad, has backed fresh elections. These moves may continue, in a minor key. ‘No Iraqi leader,’ one commentator said after Soleimani’s death, ‘will want to expose himself to accusations of being too pro-American.’ Pro-Iranian paramilitary groups have claimed from the start that the protests were ...”

“... literary editor of the Spectator in 1958, he first commissioned reviews from him, adding: ‘I may have given the impression that Frank Kermode was new to the reading public when he started writing for the paper. That was not the case. He’d already made his name with his fine book, Romantic Image.’ Well, yes, he had in a sense made his name with that ...”

“... metaphors are symptoms of vapid thought. If style expresses the soul of an author, dissecting it may seem impertinent, rather like dissecting someone’s appearance. There is an intimacy and elusiveness about style that seems to forbid such meddling. Writers might well prefer to hear that their plots are unconvincing than that their syntax is ...”

“... musings, programmatic demands, questions and arguments. Somewhere in these 417 pages readers may discover sketches for a major revaluation of utopian socialism (by Stedman Jones), significant new contributions to the debate on the origins of modern capitalism (by Hans Medick), a first-hand account of what history means for working coal-miners (by Dave ...”

“... princes are obliged to resort to in the face of desperate and difficult circumstances’; they may ‘exceed common law’ and ‘harm particular interests’ in order to promote ‘the public good’.* Naudé opposed religious fanaticism, yet he upheld as a model coup the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre of 1572, when Charles IX ordered the slaughter of ...”