“... ambition that stamped the Frühromantik – the ambience of the Schlegels, Novalis, Jean Paul, Tieck, Fichte, Schleiermacher, with Hölderlin and Kleist off-stage – made it an explosive force far beyond the sentimental reach of the Lake Poets or the vaticinations of Hugo: a starburst that could never be repeated or forgotten, as its consequences ...”

“... the first time that he’d explored the topic of paedophilia, or of sadism. Sexual criminality lay at the heart of Robbe-Grillet’s nouveau roman: the original, unspeakable absence that drives his unresolved plots. Un Roman sentimental existed as an idea, and an inspiration, long before it was written. Consider Robbe-Grillet’s 1962 story ‘La Chambre ...”

“... and repulsive content, they would have languished had it not been for two 4Chan moderators, Paul Furber and Coleman Rogers, who persuaded a struggling YouTuber called Tracy Diaz to start making videos interpreting and embroidering the posts. The videos were a hit. As outlined in a 2018 investigation by NBC News, which suggested that Diaz and Rogers ...”

“... Simpson said on Panorama. ‘It’s off the scale of everybody’s belief system,’ said the DJ Paul Gambaccini. But it is our belief system. And now it is part of the same system to blame Savile. He’s dead, anyway. Let’s blame him for all the things he obviously was, and blame him for a host of other things we don’t understand, such as how we love ...”

“... The abyss of history​ is deep enough to hold us all,’ Paul Valéry wrote in 1919, as Europe lay in ruins. The words resonate today as the coronavirus blows the roof off the world, most brutally exposing Britain and the United States, these prime movers of modern civilisation, which proudly claimed victory in two world wars, and in the Cold War, and which until recently held themselves up as exemplars of enlightened progress, economic and cultural models to be imitated across the globe ...”

“... open to the secretary of state were financial, and as punishment for the IRA’s theft of £26.5m, Paul Murphy announced on 10 March that Sinn Féin would be stripped of parliamentary allowances for Westminster worth £400,000. The next evening I drive to Moortown, a Republican area outside Cookstown, on the west side of Lough Neagh. There are pockets of ...”

“... could not permit my mind to be profaned by such intellectual whorishness’) and wrote an essay on Paul Valéry instead. ‘To know you is a calamity,’ one of his classmates told him.Schwartz would sequester himself in his room, keen to ‘impress the boys with his habit of solitude and concentration of study’. His letters to Julian Sawyer, his only close ...”

“... a title, sometimes claims to be less posh than Cameron on the grounds that his public school, St Paul’s, is in London, and he didn’t board. Both sowed the seeds of tabloid merriment by joining a ludicrous club for rich boys while at Oxford, and even Cameron’s much advertised fondness for 1980s bands like The Smiths is best understood, his biographers ...”

“... for newts. In a tobacco tin after capture, the umber yellow mature newts lost their leopard spots, lay grounded as numb as scrolls of candied grapefruit peel. I saw myself as a young newt, neurasthenic, scarlet and wild in the wild coffee-coloured water. (‘Dunbarton’) This curves – scrolls – with animation. It easily – almost naturally ...”

“... a genre called Black Naturalism which encompassed such writers as Richard Wright, Ann Petry and Paul Laurence Dunbar. The Black Naturalists found naturalism a ready-made mode for representing life under white supremacy. For many Black Americans, there was always a boundary in sight, setting a limit on how prosperous they could be, how happy, how free. I can ...”

“... in the town in 1946. I knew some of these people: Dan Bolger, for example, whose grandfather, Paul, had donated money in 1846. Dan Bolger had a shop in the town. It was hard to think of him, or any of these people, having grandparents who knew ‘bitter hunger, starvation and death’. Most of them had inherited property and exuded a certain ...”

“... offered the inspiration for ‘Pierre Menard’ than his father’s vain request. The book was Paul Valéry’s Introduction à la poétique. Williamson writes: ‘The same text, according to Borges, could mean different things to different readers in different periods, and he quoted a line from a poem by Cervantes to show that a reader in the 20th century ...”

“... vocabulary of ancient Athenian politics as against that of Jefferson, the moral vocabulary of St Paul as against that of Freud, the jargon of Newton versus that of Aristotle, the idiom of Blake rather than that of Dryden – it is difficult to think of the world as making one of these better than another, of the world as deciding between them. When the ...”

“... a group of young intellectuals from different disciplines – it included Cardoso from sociology, Paul Singer from economics, José Artur Giannotti from philosophy, Roberto Schwarz from literature – started a seminar on Capital that became a legend, lasting five years and affecting the atmosphere of the Faculty for ten. When the Armed Forces seized power in ...”

“... one of the bloodiest race riots of the century. A few hours after my father’s funeral, while he lay in state in the undertaker’s chapel, a race riot broke out in Harlem . . . As we drove him to the graveyard, the spoils of injustice, anarchy, discontent and hatred were all around us. Baldwin began with a very great subject: the drama of his own life ...”