“... of which inspired Sir Walter Scott to the curmudgeonly reflection that ‘wake where’er he may, man wakes to care and toil.’ So it proved with the Macmillans. Malcolm prospered though hard work on his poor land, becoming a tacks man, a kulak among crofters, who served as an elder of the Church of Scotland. His son Duncan, claimed by the revivalist ...”

“... research into the origins of life and the universe, nor with theories of randomness which may bring scientists at some stage to some form of religion, but with the generally shared view of science as the continuing process of objective inquiry, discovery and invention called progress which, for many people, has replaced religion. For they believe that ...”

“... these first and then turn to the biography’s particular merits. Before going further, it may be helpful if I make clear my own starting-point – that of someone who is neither a Lorca expert, a biographer nor a literary critic. My concern, as a historian and writer, has for long been with the interaction of the social and the subjective. Bear this ...”

“... and subversion in Harriot’s text’ will give us a fuller understanding of Henry IV. An example may serve to show how Greenblatt’s approach works. One of his essays, to my mind the most successful in the whole collection, deals with ‘Shakespeare and the Exorcists’. At the end of Elizabeth’s reign the Anglican clergyman Samuel Harsnett, chaplain to ...”

“... the technical advances achieved by Wagner’s use of recurring motives in a dramatic context, and may thus even have assisted Wagner in the formulation of his mature musical style. Liszt himself, though he toyed with many operatic projects during the early 1850s, never managed to find the literary stimulus to react creatively to the challenge of musical ...”

“... disease was driven to some more dangerous site, and that it eventually caused his death. The trick may have consisted in ‘putting his feet in cold water’, as reported by Mrs Thrale: a not unreasonable expedient, though unlikely to achieve much in the way of cure. The other mystery derives primarily from Johnson’s letter to Mrs Thrale of 1773, written in ...”

“... Old Testament disappeared under the powerful illumination of figurative reading. Modern readers may regard it as a historical curiosity that Augustine, reading in this fashion, should have been able, for example, to discover an adumbration of the Church in the first verses of Genesis. In his central use of Psalms, however, he needed no exercise of ingenuity ...”

“... but Duranty’s escapades, which inspire such censure from the author, seem rather tame today, and may have seemed so in the roaring Twenties. Taylor is hard on Duranty, and it can sometimes seem as if he had practically no redeeming features. He was, we are told, a leech on his friends, a disloyal colleague and an unfaithful husband. He is described as ...”

“... these statements has been a great source of strength to Pritchett. The valet who does the living may have particular sympathies, the writer stays detached. He began a long love-affair with Spain in his early twenties and in the Civil War made speeches on behalf of the Republicans, but he never wrote anything resembling a propagandist story. And if some of ...”

“... was confidence and the expectation of further enrichment, whatever shortcomings there may have been in fact in the distribution of wealth and levels of deprivation in town and country. After it, all was despair and the assumption that, in the natural order of things, Scotland would always need special care and attention.’ Pessimistic though this ...”

“... of his eyes/ was totally written-off,/ he was harnessed to a retinagraph’, ‘So that, though it may seem somewhat improbable,/ all that follows/ flickers and flows/ from the back of his right eyeball.’ What takes the reader through the poem is pleasure and puzzlement in roughly equal measure. Whatever Muldoon is, he isn’t the maths master type of ...”

“... correct: but in Wasserstein’s pages the early part of the story is obscured, for Samuel may well have missed a chance to bring the affair to an end in July 1912. The insinuation by Asquith, and by his official biographers, that he did not know about the American Marconi purchases until early in 1913 should never have been given credence. He knew ...”

“... as I hope we will see, necessarily so routes, right back to Slavenka Drakulic. Drakulic’s novel may be just a mediocre first novel, slightly interesting on what it is like to recover from a life-threatening illness, mostly uninteresting on everything else. But the essays she has collected in How we survived Communism and even laughed are a different ...”

“... up enough of the ‘Hound Dog’ days for those who thought themselves for ever young. He may have been banned back in the Fifties for a swivelling pelvis: he was never banned for singing anything. His first year of stardom may have been subversive, but thereafter he settled in to become one of the most ...”

“... little tribulations. From Wordsworth’s daffodils to Hughes’s brutal snowdrops, objects may flash upon the inward eye of English verse, but they are also carried alive into the heart by passion. Even that vice Anglais, nostalgia, Tennyson’s passion of the past, reinstates the metaphysics of presence, dealing not in absences but in the felt ...”