“... appetites – for tales, news, gossip or truth. Among the essays is one on Books of Hours by Paul Saenger, who discusses the effect of the ancient discovery of silent reading and the later development of the portable, personal book. He looks at the history of oral versus silent prayer and the consequences of the privacy the silently-read page offers ...”

“... this to say for blood and breath,’ runs the latest one, from A.E. Housman: ‘They give a man a taste for death.’ Are we being directed to hold in mind those other lines of Housman’s? Oh like enough ’tis blood, my dear, For when the knife has slit The throat across from ear to ear ’Twill bleed because of it. Just such a shambles is evoked at ...”

“... Carlyle’s writings, with special attention paid to their political thought’, and Paul Johnson, whose high-pastiche polemic, Wake Up Britain! A Latter-Day Pamphlet (1994), was resolutely slept through. The Carlylean inflection can also be heard in the newspapers and magazines with which these writers are associated: the two Mails, the two ...”

“... franchise, and spam emails offering penis enlargements and fat sums of money from Nigeria. This no man’s land of media culture is Coupland’s home ground. The astonishingly full and varied body of work that began with Generation X in 1991 is populated by alienated characters: a beauty queen, a medium, people caught up in human-interest news stories (high ...”

“... poverty. There is another cloak joke in Don Quixote, about St Martin who divided his with a poor man: ‘from which we may conclude that it was a cold day for such was the saint’s charity that had it been a warm one he would doubtless have given the poor man his whole cloak.’ Cervantes was poor for a purely literary ...”

“... and there is no evidence that he did so, any more than there is reason to suppose that Lorenzo de’ Medici, whose name suggested laurels sacred to Apollo, supposed that people would think him a descendant of that Greek god when he used the laurel as a device, or that the noble Orsini wished to claim kinship with the bears (orsi) by which they announced ...”

“... bureaucratic existence is their only alternative. Here is Japi on his education: Then your old man sticks you in an office. And you realise that the reason you learned all those things was so that you could wet slips of paper with a little brush. And it’s always the same old routine, be there nine o’clock sharp, sit there quietly for hours and hours. I ...”

“... in the seat of consciousness nor at his nerve ends, but in a generalised feeling of being Michel de Montaigne. He was not alone in almost, so to speak, losing it. In the second chapter of Reveries of the Solitary Walker, Rousseau recounts how, on 24 October 1776, outside Paris, he was rushed by an enormous Great Dane. He calculated at once that his only ...”

“... a letter stops to talk – and what enables him to break the ice is that she is a woman doing a man’s job. 8 January. By train to Cambridge on a day of blinding sunshine and bitter cold. We eat our sandwiches on the train, a busy, bucketing electric job that scampers through Shepreth and Foxton and very different from the plodding little steam train I ...”

“... in 1916 John Quinn began collecting his work; he knew the photographers Edward Steichen and Man Ray – and Romanian connections, which were maintained all his life. There is hardly a significant name which does not turn up in some context or other, from Picasso and the Douanier Rousseau to Nancy Cunard and ...”

“... weird compulsions and his sister’s suicide, as written up in Freud’s case history ‘The Wolf Man’. In Freud’s view, the Wolf Man’s story was easily resolved, a classic allegory of Oedipal trauma; but for later critics (Abraham and Torok, Deleuze and Guattari), the case dramatises the inadequacy of the Freudian ...”

“... Anglo-American political science is dominated by the image of rational man. Politics is the maximising of something or other: material benefits for the voter, votes for the politician. Politicians competing for the voters’ favour have to think strategically and rationally. They cannot waste effort on lost causes, nor afford to take up positions too far from the centre ...”

“... the author’s partner, Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil, writes to Jérôme Lindon at Editions de Minuit to advise that Beckett does not wish his novel to be entered for the Prix des Critiques. It is 19 April 1951, Beckett is 45, the novel in question is Molloy. Suzanne explains: What he dreads above all, in the very unlikely event of his receiving a ...”

“... like Brandt, were German. The spread of TB was one of the legacies of the First World War. As Paul Delany tells us, in Germany TB sufferers doubled in number in the last two years of the war, when ‘soap disappeared completely, and the streetcars were foul with the distinctive stench of famine.’ Rolf Brandt, Willy’s younger brother,would later talk ...”

“... Flight into Egypt, for instance, and umpteen pictures of gambling and card games which, even by de la Tour, I find hard to take. Rupert as always looks more carefully than I do and gets more out of it. A terrific picture by Ribera of an old man with the withered and drooping flesh of his arm exactly done (via his ...”