“... like Pushkin’s, to maintain the law of sound imagining. The law, if it held, would state that we are diseased    When the moral will Intervenes to sap the heart, When the difficult feelings are Titillated and confused For novel combinations, or Ransacked for virtue. To be specific: As Byron said of Keats, ‘I don’t mean he is indecent, but ...”

“... else. The manufacture and dissemination of global ethics is a neglected strand of globalisation. We are all familiar with the core values embodied in human rights, democracy, ‘civil society’ and ‘governance’ – an aseptic word that seems to mean government minus politics. We also know the core institutions: the ...”

“... enabled individuals to draw on the state’s coercive power to settle private grievances. When we think of denunciation in a totalitarian context, we think of secret police, of ideologies exalting loyalty to the state or party, of zero tolerance of dissent, and the possibility of appalling outcomes – death or ...”

“... lusts and local hatreds: Dear Katherine, David came and took me out of my bed last night and we went for a long walk in McGavin Park and he kissed me in the carpark but I didn’t let him go all the way, not like that Morag McGregor in 104 who does it with anyone. Dear Fiona, I wasn’t going to tell you this, but David borrowed some of my Toyah ...”

“... The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. ‘Five years, that’s all we’ve got,’ he sang on the album’s opening number. Nobody in 1972, least of all Bowie himself, could have predicted where he would be in five years’ time, let alone forty. Yet Bowie’s towering and contradictory status, as both the most derivative and ...”

“... a Fulbright scholarship; she meets Ted Hughes and marries him. Two roses, Frieda and Nicholas. If we could read it all simultaneously – journals, letters, stories, poems – a truer picture would emerge: of her doing and her desiring at the same time. It would create, as David Trinidad is quoted as saying in Peter Steinberg’s introduction, ‘a movie of ...”

“... to escape the amorous god of poetry, Apollo. The laurel referred to is the sweet-scented variety we know as the bay tree, hence the joke in one of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks: ‘Why was Petrarch so madly in love with Laura? Because it tastes so good with sausage and thrush.’ Another wordplay is on l’aura, meaning ‘breeze’ or ‘breath’ and ...”

“... with lower-case letters at the beginning of lines, might have been no more than what Stefan George, who employed such devices wholesale, was later to call barbed wire against the uninitiated (‘Stacheldraht wider Unberufene’). But the archaic language had the more destructively alienating effect of sounding poetic while concealing meaning ...”

“... synthesis of James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom (1988) – whose title alone suggested that we were back on familiar terrain – and in the sepia-tinted sentimentality of Ken Burns’s documentary. In McPherson’s influential work, a fixation on racial rather than class relations ensured that there would be no more discomfiting questions about the ...”

“... I went up to Oxford, and featured a jolly song supposedly counselling against nostalgia called ‘We Said We’d Never Look Back’, any three bars of which bring back memories of what I most disliked about those times. Now it is back in the West End, and its revival coincides with the publication of Sebastian Faulks’s ...”

“... Peter Halket, Schreiner’s fictional trooper, witnesses the hangings. He has raped women in the bush and machine-gunned villages, toppling rows of ‘black men’s heads’ like ‘the corn in sheaves’. When confronted at the campfire by a vision of Jesus, he hides behind his boss. ‘With Cecil it’s all right; you can do what you like … provided that ...”

“... Trump in the ‘cockpit of American power’ will reveal ‘just how terrifyingly normal a nation we are, with our populist jingoism and hawkish foreign policy’. The bipartisan support for the president’s bombing campaigns shows that little has changed in this respect, however. As Trump ordered strikes on Syria in April last year, Fareed Zakaria hailed ...”

“... option for restless spirits: a motive that can be traced back to early Victorian times, when George Borrow’s fascination with Spanish or Gypsy low life was bred of detestation for native ‘gentility’. On the other hand, Britain’s Imperial primacy – whose memory long outlasted its reality – inevitably encouraged dreams of daring exploits in ...”

“... things. Have you read The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard? … The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be – will be utterly submerged.’ ‘Tom’s getting very profound,’ his wife Daisy remarks. Buchanan carries on: ‘This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out ...”

“... belief’. This hardly seems up to the job: if that’s all the word means, the wonder is that we have waited so long for it. When has our understanding of public life not been shaped more by emotion than by ‘objective facts’? When was this golden age of objectivity? Surely not in the time when press lords such as Northcliffe and Beaverbrook liked to ...”