“... At these times he was indeed the ‘spectator ab extra’ that Coleridge called him, seeing man outwardly ennobled, or men in patterns, pageants, processions, that pleased his creativity and did not intrude too much upon his consciousness. Where Pirie, more solicitous of the student, the novice or the amateur, stresses that Wordsworth is a human being ...”

“... mistress into what students of more humdrum disciplines would probably want to call ‘a man’: a Jean, this is to say, as opposed to a Jeanne. It is not the first detail that Mrs Willis would have noticed about ‘Mlle’ Duval, who was probably a smoker, but she would have rumbled her in the end. ‘Mallarmé loved cigarettes,’ says ...”

“... at the heart of high Modernism – as exemplified by, say, Eliot’s strict division between the man that suffers and the mind that creates, or Yeats’s delight in pitting antithetical forces against each other. But Olson went further still, hoping to undo the entire Western tradition of rational, dialectical thinking, the ‘inaccurate estimate of reality ...”

“... it, even though it would soon be in ruins. They took up propaganda work with the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, a not quite Trotskyist party of which Trotsky himself was fiercely critical. The POUM’s members (including a number of its leaders) were drawn from the Left and Right Opposition to the Comintern, though it’s commemorated for its ...”

“... to negotiate with terrorist kidnappers in Beirut to escape the meaninglessness of his art. Falling Man is a modest and quiet book about a large aftermath. It captures the turn in the three years after 9/11 to a new feeling, still active in 2007, of a contemporary American state of suspension, after the worst had happened and the nation perhaps played its hand ...”

“... cult. He was in fact an unparalleled witness, at least to his time. But he was an unpopular man. It’s precisely what one might adore about him – the tolerance, the internationalism, the political sagacity, the ability to be both artist and doer, the attachment to the ideals of workers’ democracy and freedom of thought – that galled many of his ...”

“... would continue to reinforce the ethic of empire, both at its creation and in its dismantling. (Paul Scott’s fictional Chillingborough, the school which binds together so many of the characters in the Raj Quartet, much to the outsider Merrick’s disgust, was a typically perceptive creation.) Such establishment Anglo-Indian connections would also be made ...”

“... rapacious and an infidel of blackest dye, rescued on his deathbed from certain damnation by the man she would come to know for an unprincipled humbug, Gilbert Burnet. She must have known that the role Burnet cast for himself in Some Passages in the Life and Death of the Earl of Rochester was a lie; Rochester’s steward wrote to Sir Ralph Verney that ...”

“... hostility to Oslo, and had compared trading land for peace to appeasement with Hitler. Mishal, Paul McGeough writes in Kill Khalid, his gripping account of the plot, was selected from a list of targets by Netanyahu not only because he was suspected of orchestrating the suicide bomb campaign, but because he made an articulate case for Hamas’s position, in ...”

“... ill-planned, reflecting the random interests of donors and local patronage networks. It is a brave man who reveals these things: it is an even braver one who honestly tries to explain the source which he believes is poisoning a potentially viable development. Bista locates two main causes, which are again interconnected. In his view, the root cause of fatalism ...”

“... it could readily prove an intellectual nightmare. Writing a very short book about any very great man is unlikely to be easy. But the difficulty is certain to be augmented where the brief for the book is not merely to tell the story of a human life but also to interpret the authority which that life discloses, and to make clear how far this authority was ...”

“... and now am old; my cup runneth over; many a time; clean gone; the days of old; I am a worm and no man; his heart’s desire; the heavens declare the glory of god; go down to the sea in ships; at their wits’ end; the valley of the shadow of death; make a joyful noise; go from strength to strength . . . The 1611 King James Authorised Version of the Book of ...”

“... closed eyelids and the immanent presence of the sacred’.Jay begins his history in the Chavín de Huántar, a temple in the High Andes of Peru rediscovered by archaeologists in the 1930s. A carved figure in an inner sanctum, ‘snake-haired, sprouting fangs and claws’ and wielding a San Pedro cactus like an upraised baguette, has been dated to 1200 bce ...”

“... extremely excited when reading the early papers of the distinguished Austrian/American biologist, Paul Weiss, who had transplanted the legs of a salamander from back to front and left to right and found the specificity of the original position not only retained but reflected in the very limb movements. Medawar was so entranced and intrigued by the phenomenon ...”

“... sad months’ in Bellevue mental hospital. As a full-blown Romantic he would read these years as a De Quincey-like apprenticeship: vignettes of poverty, endless movement around the same small nexus of streets, the Village, Little Italy. He was ‘God’s spy’, a poet fink keeping secret notebooks. The early poems are about his mother and the sea, their ...”