“... in its original scoring; the piano accompaniments for the others have a space and colour that may stem from their instrumental origins. ‘Orpheus with His Lute’, with words from Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, opens the cycle with rising E major semi-quavers, and moments of harmonic shock, with voice and piano sometimes just a tone apart. ‘Under the ...”

“... was as precious as that of any Englishman, and so the law demanded justice for his death. Gouge may not have known it, or felt it as protection, but living under Dandy’s roof his inalienable self was shielded by the sovereignty of England, which encompassed its colonies. Those servants who were not beaten to death, or held in a state of abject ...”

“... the possible: you can’t have one even if you try, and you can have the other without trying. We may speculate that what he wanted was not to achieve the impossible, and still less to arrive at some comfortable middle space of possibility, but to manage something like an occasional, dazzling infraction of the logic of opposites: to find in effort some of the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... rewarding supporters with patronage – tends towards mass allegiance. And threatening those who may not support populist rule with losing jobs or benefits solves the problem of how to exert control over a society without too much direct repression. Such dynamics are what the sociologist Bálint Magyar has in mind when he refers to the rise of a ‘mafia ...”

“... always needed​ to have books around me, quantities of them, ever since I can remember. There may be something pathological about it. When I was a boy, the eldest child of literate but not bibliophile parents, in a big enough house in suburban Cheshire, most of my pocket money went on books – Billy Bunter, Jennings, William, War Picture ...”

“... is simple: the more one writes, the better chance one has of producing something worthwhile. ‘It may be the case that we all must write many books in order to achieve a few lasting ones,’ she told the Paris Review in 1978. You should try, of course, to make every novel as good as it can be – but you have to be prepared to fail.Failure is never far away ...”

“... sand expressed the hope that ‘many centuries hence when other memory of it shall be lost, [they] may declare to succeeding ages that [this] place was once a member of the British Empire.’ Within a few days of this final appeal to posterity, the remaining settlers would be either dead or enslaved, the captives of Moulay Ismaïl, the Alaouite Sultan of ...”

“... connections and various under-the-counter arrangements became a national pastime. Marxist ideology may have emphasised production, but in the Soviet Union it was hierarchies of consumption (based on preferential access to goods) that mattered.3 From the citizens’ standpoint, the key decisions of Soviet-type governments were all about allocation: that is, who ...”

“... as supposedly common land is reclaimed. Police guard the Houses of Parliament, fearing protesters may try to get ‘inside’, but they wouldn’t bother. Chard and rhubarb are planted, with rosemary, lemon balm and hemp. A maypole is put up with a garland of flowers at the top and children hop round it. Someone sand-sculpts a huge-breasted Gaia opposite Big ...”

“... When we met in England, Ginsberg had abdicated another impromptu throne, as King of the May (Kral Majales) in Prague. He had been expelled for taking off his clothes during a reading to his student subjects. Further prophetic challenges lay in store. We went on a pilgrimage to Glastonbury. There, after pausing under the great conical chimney of the ...”

“... Irish Americans were embarrassed by the conditions they found when they visited Ireland. The Irish may be less ethnically visible in New York than they were, but they haven’t disappeared. In the 1980 census, 40 million Americans said they were descended from Irish people; by 1990, the figure had jumped to 45 million and this year’s census ...”