“... wrote about how contact with the earth was ‘operative as an elixir’. Atlas, Antaeus says,. . . may well throw me and renew my birthBut let him not plan, lifting me off the earth,My elevation, my fall.Antaeus lost his strength in elevation and was weakened in ascent. In Electric Light there is a lot of air and flight and ‘lift’; in fact, it is as if the ...”

“... struggle, through an official sequence of dynastic history and philosophers’ names that may have been only fitfully meaningful to them. In 1974, Ma Yang was a ‘peasant’, in the vanguard of the Maoist version of class struggle; now the label describes him as a ‘farmer’, the translation of the same Chinese word favoured by present-day official ...”

“... Be cautious about lust, that story would rather sentimentally go, because even simulated lust may turn you into a human being. No, it’s rather that Wong lives in a world – Ang Lee and his writers want us to think about a world – in which performance is everything, or everything you can know for sure. There is another self beyond the current action ...”

“... house in Sansepolcro where Piero’s nephew, Francesco, lived with his wife, Madonna Laudomia. It may have been a gift to mark their marriage, an important match securing an alliance with a family from the nearby town of Montevarchi. Most historians now agree that The Nativity was a private project rather than a commission, a consensus that challenges the ...”

“... Seu Jorge as the Marxist politician and guerrilla fighter Carlos Marighella.‘The Secret Agent’ may refer to the fact that in 1970s Brazil ordinary citizens were forced to live undercover – that it was all too easy to become a secret agent in your own life. The phrase also has a cameo as the title of a film within the film. We see it come up in caps on a ...”

“... start on the question of what a poem, as distinct from any other sort of proposition or utterance, may have to tell us, or show us, about violence.Now as at all times I can see in the mind’s eye,In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied onesAppear and disappear in the blue depth of the skyWith all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,And ...”

“... I like white coats. But then I’m a butcher’s son. White coats have no terrors for me. 1 May. Home, and my first outing is to the local community centre to vote against the dreadful Boris. I wear an overcoat over my pyjamas, something I’d never have the face to do if I was well. But I’ve been ill, I think, and now I’m getting better. Home to a ...”

“... I am afraid this may prove rather a gossipy Inaugural Lecture but I feel it is the main thing I have to offer on this occasion. I could talk, instead, about my theoretical books, which have been mainly about double meanings in literature, and the mechanics of how they have a literary effect: but I haven’t found that that has much to do with teaching literature, in my experience so far, so it is perhaps not very relevant here ...”

“... not uncommon, of that boundary becoming blurred or even disappearing, an experience that may hold a clue to the feeling, also not uncommon, that Wagner’s work is in some sense not altogether good for us.Respecting boundaries was not Wagner’s thing. Transgression he took in his stride – stealing other men’s wives when he needed them, spending ...”

“... and issues no passports. This swirling, uplifting work (its oak kept young and vital by varnish) may also realise Brancusi’s sole intention, ‘to bring joy’, and he’s abetted by its accessibility, a vexing issue in regard to Modernism’s afterlife. How often is Ulysses read beyond the classroom? Have you ever noticed how most museum-goers don’t ...”

“... But there were no beds available and he was seen as an out-patient every day until his trial on 3 May, at which point a bed was found for him in Dulwich North Hospital. He was remanded on bail on condition that he went to hospital – if a bed had not become available he would have gone to prison. There have been several cases recently in which High Court ...”

“... other Palestinian refugees that they would somehow ‘return’. However unrealistic this pledge may have appeared through the long decades spent in the refugee camps, it remained the focus of their lives and the purpose of their suffering. Driven by this pledge, thousands of young fighters were to die in Jordan in 1970 and in Lebanon between 1975 and ...”

“... who looks not long out of school himself, polishes off the whole sequence in a couple of hours. 10 May. Filling a pot with water to take a huge bunch of peonies L. has sent for my birthday I slip on the wet flags and fall down three or four of the stone steps into the area. It’s a fall long enough for me to think, ‘This is quite serious,’ as it’s going ...”

“... agitate for unification, Wales explores its relationship with England, Labour faces a split that may lead some of the party to an explicit embrace of extra-parliamentary politics, and Farage stirs the pot, the situation is unlikely to resolve itself any time soon. This has the makings of a full-blown constitutional crisis that the Conservative Party, no ...”

“... each day I pass through my field             up. And that it             may choose its             spot so freely, from which to scan, and, without more than the wintry beguiling             wingstrokes seeding             the fields of air, swoop. It feeds. There is no wasteland where the dead oak ...”