“... more fitting to ‘thirtysomethings’. Indeed, Mullin’s unworldliness is shallower than it may seem. As the new millennium dawns, he laments that ‘I am entering a period of unprecedented obscurity’ but hopes that ‘my eclipse will be temporary.’ Eclipses often are. Mullin dreams of worldly glory despite recognising the limits on his ...”

“... are responsible for all our woes,’ we might be anywhere from Diyarbakir to Delhi. The remark may be designed to raise a smile, but Osman’s anger at meddlesome foreigners is sincere, and more than justified. In 1973, Daud topples his cousin in a republican coup, only to turn against his leftist allies and lose his life in a Communist coup in 1978. After ...”

“... melancholia and mania without fever, as Soranus of Ephesus and Aretaeus of Cappadocia did, they may well have been describing fluctuations of psychotic agitation unrelated to mood swings. Bipolarity in the modern sense could not have emerged until it became possible to identify mood disorders without delirium or intellectual disorders; in other words, it ...”

“... which reduce us to an oppressed half-life from which we break out at our peril. Childhood may be relatively happy – it offers, as the young narrator Marcus tells us in Indignation, ‘unimperilled, unchanging days when everybody felt safe and settled in his place’ – but as soon as the sex instinct kicks in, parental protectiveness turns into ...”

“... isn’t really a riddle at all, doesn’t mean our puzzlement is a poorly advised response. It may be all we have, and it is certainly all we have if we can’t resist tuning our minds to what puzzles us. All four of the novels DeLillo has published since Underworld – The Body Artist (2001), Cosmopolis (2003), Falling Man (2007) and now Point Omega ...”

“... now in power in Baghdad is as sectarian, corrupt and dysfunctional as Saddam’s ever was. There may be less state violence, but only because the state is weaker. Its methods are equally brutal: Iraqi prisons are full of people who have made false confessions under torture or the threat of it. An Iraqi intellectual who had planned to open a museum in Abu ...”

“... and the soft ‘Sh!’ of the river      That will last for ever. While their arguments may have been temporarily soothed – you can still hear the retort ‘shut up and go to sleep!’ folded into the calm fourth line – the poem ends anxiously: ‘Strange, how we suffer in spite of this!’ It wasn’t strange. Lawrence had demanded that Frieda ...”

“... for One of Ours, and what Cather called ‘love letters’ from young men struck by the September-May romance of A Lost Lady. And she lived, according to some posthumous critics, as a closeted homosexual. Cather had many potential reasons for forbidding publication of her letters. Willa Cather in New Hampshire in 1917. Reading them suggests a more ...”

“... but one’s kindred, whoever cares enough about the work to guard it responsibly. James, though, may have taken a certain pleasure in entrusting his relatives per damnationem with his art, given that it was the very thing that had estranged him from them. And knowing that Harry, an accomplished lawyer and historian, would take over from Alice, James honoured ...”

“... worn magnificence We forget cruelty and past betrayal, Heedless of where the next bright bolt may fall.Here is Graves’s famous idea of poetry as cruel mistress, in whose service the devoted poet experiences sudden illumination and punishment as much the same thing. But though ‘The White Goddess’ scorns the lowland poets ‘ruled by the God ...”

“... doing. ‘The more you look, the more you have to stand in awe of the author’s talents.’ This may be so. Nevertheless, there is one novelistic skill that no saga-author possesses, and its absence is what makes the sagas so enigmatic: the art of explaining complex human motivations. You don’t have to read much of any classic novel before you reach ...”

“... introduction to her life and work, and also an essay on the importance of her work in his life. May Swenson told Bishop that, when reading some of her poems, ‘I have to furnish them with “meanings” from my own experience because you’ve left yours out.’ Tóibín is drawn to similar furnishings: ‘I have a close relationship with silence, with ...”

“... speech, but that we should seek precepts which will help us, utterance of courage and spirit which may at once be turned into facts. We should so learn them that words may become deeds. In Philology James Turner attempts a heroic defence of this misunderstood breed. He argues that philology lies at the heart of all the ...”

“... money. The overthrow of capitalism for Marx is ‘the emancipation of mankind from Judaism’. It may seem odd to include a chapter on Islam in a history of Western anti-Judaism. It makes sense, however, since Islam’s attitude to Judaism shares important features with Christianity’s, draws on Christian materials, and gives rise to figures of Judaism that ...”

“... part of her own Life composed two more for her obscure patron saints, Rupert and Disibod. She may have drawn on oral tradition and now lost sources, but much of her material stemmed from visions and what contemporaries called inventio (‘discovery’). When all else failed, hagiographers could resort to plagiarism. Gregory of Tours explained why one ...”