“... whenever a society mutinies and decides to make a new world. I first saw it in the Sorbonne in May 1968, clinging to a landing-wall to avoid being sucked into the deafening vortex, the up-torrent waving despatches from the front line and the barricades, the downrush battling towards the street with rolls of posters and strung bundles of fresh ...”

“... months after Giraud arrived on Ile de France. As soon as he stepped off the boat from France in May 1777 Giraud was placed in chains and confined to prison. On 15 August, in the late afternoon, he and another prisoner, a young boy named Cézar, were digging a trench close to the island’s administrative headquarters. Giraud and Cézar were chained ...”

“... out with figments of the author’s imagination, not at all at Artemisia’s behest, though she may waive her objections. Banti asks and receives Artemisia’s permission to tell. She runs up against Artemisia’s reluctance to admit the author to her thoughts. The game of concealment is mutual: ‘We are playing a chasing game, Artemisia and I.’ At one ...”

“... was accepted mainly because it was so blindingly obvious to all save the most abject blimps. (They may have included some leading politicians – Churchill initially, and Ernest Bevin.) The disparity between Britain’s postwar situation and her colonial responsibilities was just too huge. Hyam spends some time debating which was the key factor: colonial ...”

“... The only reason​ Werner Herzog hasn’t yet made a film about the Ancient Mariner may be that, having already inadvertently incorporated so many elements of the poem into his own work, he has become him. Herzog certainly shares Coleridge’s interest in the physical and spiritual toll taken by epic voyages into uncharted waters ...”

“... in it. As the archbishop tells Henry V, ‘many things, having full reference/To one consent, may work contrariously.’ So although consent can mean ‘feeling together’ (Latin con-sentire), or even (from Middle French) ‘complicity’, it can also be the truce-line of conflict. Singular and inward, it requires another party if it is to be more than ...”

“... per cent of all users who play a game will never monetise.’ If your game is popular enough, that may still mean hundreds of thousands of players spending within it. Attracting potential spenders is therefore a vital part of what people in the business unromantically call ‘user acquisition’. Many of them, like me, will spend only small sums, and only once ...”

“... for a moment the infirmities of old age. Ageing can blur the lines of sexual difference – this may have been part of the comedy – but I have to say that these masks (and others like them from Sparta) look female to me. Maybe in the rite physical decrepitude and being old-womanish went together. And this possibility is all the more ...”

“... that love poetry was at the centre of things: ‘It seems to me the hub of what I do and, if I may pursue the wheel image, out from the hub branch the spokes of other concerns, but they’re related to the love poetry.’ As it happens, he said almost exactly the same thing about Louis MacNeice, identifying one of his most important literary ...”

“... The young have had their education and their socialisation disrupted, with consequences that may take years to play out – that may, for all we know, be irreversible. Covid has involved an upturning of the contract between the generations: children have been conscripted to protect adults, and have paid the price. To ...”

“... demonstrated, such distracting irregularities can simply be red herrings, and these intrusions may have no bearing on the question of who blew up Pan Am 103. Was it individuals? Was it a country? And if so which one? From the very beginning, in fact, it seemed that the case could and would be easily solved. Considerable (and uncomplicated) evidence ...”

“... in his later work – including The Enigma of Capital – the fount of all crisis. The term may seem paradoxical: what could it mean for capital to overaccumulate, when the entire spirit of the system is, as Marx wrote, ‘accumulation for accumulation’s sake’? How could capitalism acquire too much of what it regards as the sole good ...”

“... sings with moral purpose like a Wesley hymn. And Browning goes on, almost as splendidly: ‘There may be no end of the poets who communicate to us what they see in an object with reference to their own individuality; what it was before they saw it, in reference to the aggregate human mind, will be as desirable to know as ever.’ Browning’s prose expands ...”

“... didn’t necessarily land well with whichever wife, mistress, girlfriend or elevated groupie he may have been tethered to at the time. Apart from the hectic wear and tear of guilt pangs, paramour juggling, deceptions and flare-ups (in a jealous fit, he once slapped Staats hard across the face – ‘you could see the impact of his hand … all through the ...”

“... multitude of fine touches.’ A Sportsman’s Sketches, published in 1852, became a sensation and may have contributed to the liberation of the serfs in 1861 (Alexander II is said to have claimed it as an influence on his decision). For the rest of his life, Turgenev was the most famous Russian in Europe. His celebrity, but also the novelty of his ...”