“... done.’ Brown’s prosecution, ‘the first modern courtroom event’, is one of five cases that Robert Ferguson examines in The Trial in American Life. As Ferguson points out, America’s courtroom dramas have always done more than transform the reputation of the person at their centre: They also satisfy revenge, purge communal resentments, assign limits ...”

“... figure, and in Anthony Munday’s Robin Hood play within a play, The Downfall and Death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon, a ‘real-life’ Skelton takes the role of Friar Tuck. His recovery came on the back of the rise of Modernism, with its opening of readers’ minds to new kinds of non-traditional poetry, and it was confirmed with the appearance of ...”

“... of one sense triggers stimulation in a completely different sensory modality’, so that colours may be heard, sounds tasted, smells seen. Famous synaesthetes – as those who suffer from (or enjoy?) the condition are known – include Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Kandinsky, Nabokov and Hockney. John Harrison’s Synaesthesia: The Strangest Thing, a scientific and ...”

“... in certain purification rites could be thrown outside the sanctuary of the god. Robert Parker is the first scholar to have considered all these different aspects of pollution, and to show how they relate to one another, and he does so without trying to impose on them a conceptual framework that would give priority either to the physical or ...”

“... until it becomes their proper nature. It is the same with writers and artists. Byron or David or Robert Lowell cannot slink off and become their ordinary selves in the intervals of being poets and painters and men of the age. Greta Garbo is always Greta Garbo, once she has found the part. But there is quite a different category of actor, as of ...”

“... my accursed temper and moodiness.’ Even so, it might be true of him, as Ian Hamilton wrote of Robert Frost, that ‘he knew his own failings, knew what the world would think of him if it found out, and yet believed the world was wrong.’ In this short selection of Edward Thomas’s letters George Thomas has aimed, he says, at reflecting the entire ...”

“... care less. ‘It’s good to kind of go along with your life,’ he told Entertainment Weekly in May as the first episodes went out, adding that he had spent the première ‘in my woodshop’, working on a table to have at his side while eating Parmesan crackers or practising transcendental meditation. At first glance the new series was just as disconnected ...”

“... A memorable image in Robert Musil’s Man without Qualities likens the impact of a certain character to that of a powdery avalanche. The effect of reading Marina Warner’s magisterial works of cultural history is somewhat similar: the cool temperature, the graceful touch, the sensation of resistance being gently annihilated under an accumulation of brilliant particularity ...”

“... age. Anyhow, the version of anti-intellectualism that’s current is Psychological Darwinism, and Robert Kurzban’s new book is a typical instance. I’ll take a paragraph or two to sketch the connection between what Psychological Darwinists say and the anti-intellectualist thesis that there aren’t any minds. After that, I’ll focus on the latter, as does ...”

“... tyranny, but the future of democracy was under threat. In the Washington Post of 11 August, Robert Kagan asserted that the conflict will be seen as ‘a turning point no less significant’ than the fall of the Berlin Wall. Given this ‘much bigger drama’, ‘the details of who did what to precipitate Russia’s war against Georgia are not very ...”

“... more than the ‘free’ bright colour of Parisian painting. Chagall travelled to Paris in May 1911 and ended up living in a studio at La Ruche (‘the beehive’), a dilapidated, circular establishment divided into wedge-shaped studios for artists and writers, wives and lovers, memorably described by the sculptor Ossip Zadkine as a ‘sinister wheel ...”

“... See another country, learn another language: advice as old as the Greeks. In May 1572, a very young man left England, in the words of his passport, ‘for his attaining to the knowledge of foreign languages’, but attached to a diplomatic mission, something more serious than a mere Grand Tour. He was a participant in the often menacing jollifications which accompanied the finalisation of an Anglo-French treaty and a marriage alliance with the house of Navarre ...”

“... said in an interview, ‘has business to exist … if there’s a reasonable chance that somebody may have his perceptions rearranged by having read it’. The poem exists as a subversive agent, ‘psychologically, sensuously’. The aim is to produce a dislocative effect. ‘I’m suspicious of poetry which can be embraced by people who are interested in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... collars, and grey flannel suits march down city streets lined with offices and banks. Auschwitz may have been a world away from Levittown, but in Hannah Arendt’s vision of totalitarianism – ‘destroying all space between men and pressing men against each other’ – postwar writers found an apt description of social life as a whole. When Betty Friedan ...”