“... individual psalms have been put, the detailed Christian exegeses of everyone from St Augustine to John Donne (and only very rarely the Jewish exegeses of Rashi and Avraham ibn Ezra), or even – except where there are specific references – other passages in the Bible. (This is contrary to Jewish tradition, which tends to pile up citations and defer to the ...”

“... First published in France in 1817, the princess’s prison journal was translated into English by John Wilson Croker in 1823. Croker noted that several passages are obscure, and one or two contradictory: there are frequent repetitions, and a general want of arrangement. All these, which would be defects in a regular history, increase the value of this ...”

“... nor any playmate; Only an avenue, dark, nameless, without end. (‘Old Man’) It is odd, as John Bayley noted in an essay two decades ago, how frequently the poetry conveys its most potent sense of Thomas’s elusive selfhood at the very moment that self nears the brink of dissolution. This dissolution is far from the ‘extinction of ...”

“... drink of?”’ The text is Mark 10.38; the context Christ’s answer to the request of James and John that they may sit with him in glory. He says the seats in glory are not for him to give, but also, rather forbiddingly, that they will indeed get to drink of the cup he drinks of. In the secular framework of the novel, though, the voice is surely saying that ...”

“... large figure paintings (including Golgotha, a shtetl crucifixion, with the figures of Mary and St John based on his parents), one enthusiastic critic said it was ‘as if by mistake, the works of a child, truly fresh, “barbaric” and fantastic, had landed there.’ When his work was shown in Berlin two years later the response was even more ...”

“... saw little reason to take scripture neat. Both Hufeland and the Scottish political statistician John Sinclair reckoned the patriarchal ‘year’ to be three months, making the oldest man who ever lived only 240. Human beings were still thought to live less long than they once did, but Old Tom Parr and a few others of his sort continued to be cited as ...”

“... and teaching at Iowa at the time, and became familiar with the ideas of Southern Agrarians such as John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate, whose wife, Caroline Gordon, would become an astute reader of drafts of O’Connor’s stories, and a staunch literary advocate. T.S. Eliot, the great hero of the New Critics, and of the Agrarians also, inevitably loomed large ...”

“... Why must we exist in perpetual uncertainty (only ended by death) as to whether we are well or ill? John Donne speaks of illness as an invader, which sets up a kingdom and conceals ‘secrets of State, by which it will proceed, and not be bound to declare them’. So profound are the effects of the belief that we are ill that hypochondria must be seen as a ...”

“... Having seen the TV programme on which it was based I’ve been reading Britten’s Children by John Bridcut. Glamorous though he must have been and a superb teacher, I find Britten a difficult man to like. He had his favourites, children and adults, but both Britten and Pears were notorious for cutting people out of their lives (Eric Crozier is mentioned ...”

“... In the duc’s version Mélusine appeared to the English commander, a grizzled veteran called John Cresswell, in his bedroom, where he was entertaining a lady called Alexandrine. Mélusine frightened him so much that Alexandrine reproached him: ‘How ofte haue I sene your mortal enemyes tofore your presence that neuer ye were aferd, and now for a serpent ...”

“... the man told reporters that it was actually a copy of a Purple Heart.Vietnam Veterans Trump (on John McCain): ‘He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured, OK? I hate to tell you. He’s a war hero because he was captured, OK?’ (McCain has since endorsed Trump.)Scientists Trump (tweet): ‘The ...”

“... muscle around him. (‘The primary pronoun at staff meetings was always “we”,’ the agent John Ptak says, ‘“We are doing this; we are doing that.” That never happened anywhere else.’) It is sometimes a symphony of bathos nonetheless, as one poor agent, brilliant but fearful, has to pay obeisance to some majorly talented nut-bag or other, just ...”

“... presented himself at Oxford Police Station, he was asked to empty his pockets, and extracted John Stuart Mill’s essay On Liberty.’ He was duly sent to the Isle of Man. There was a separate camp for interned Italians, and after a while the commandant took pity on the three professors in his care – the economist Piero Sraffa, the philosopher Lorenzo ...”

“... realisation that Americans, too, lived in a political order, when news reached him while abroad of John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harper’s Ferry. (Before that moment, he claims, characteristically, that he owed his entire idea of politics to the illustrations in Punch.) All this in two early pages of A Small Boy, though by a more conventional measure of ...”

“... his important 1997 book based on the newly opened Soviet archives, We Now Know, the Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis took a post-revisionist approach. He argued that Cold War studies should focus on the battle of ideas, and not just on military power, since the Soviet Union fell not as a result of military defeat or an economic crash but because of a collapse ...”