“... does not visit it, but hears the groans of torment from afar), and the Elysian Fields, the zone of bliss, where Aeneas meets his father, Anchises. Spirits do not stay in the Elysian Fields for ever – there is an elaborate cycle of reincarnation at work – but the Aeneid draws a clear connection, as the Odyssey does not, between one’s actions in life and ...”

“... there was no lecture about the Famine, the Fenians, Young Ireland, the 1916 Rising. Even poor Michael Davitt and his Land League only got a look in because they represented a headache for Charles Stewart Parnell. History was Daniel O’Connell, Parnell and John Redmond, who led the Irish Parliamentary Party in Westminster after Parnell. My grandfather had ...”

“... exciting intellectual conjunction: for anyone with half a mind for philosophy, it must have been bliss to be in Freiburg that year; for a young student it must have been heaven. And one of the lucky ones was a 22-year-old Jew from Lithuania called Emmanuel Levinas. He had been born in 1906 – which made him just six months younger than Sartre – and after ...”

“... carers: rapid sequences of dots and dashes deftly etched on the palm and fingers of a hand. Such bliss reinforces, and is itself in turn reinforced by, the intervening solitude. Herzog first met Straubinger when researching a documentary on the provision of facilities for the disabled. The film they subsequently made together is a stirring testament to her ...”

“... to stay on at Ferox Hall to recover (it was this accident that prompted him to hire an assistant, Michael Faraday). In 1815, the year before Mary Shelley wrote her story about the reanimating powers of electricity, Children constructed the most powerful galvanic battery yet invented, for which he received the Royal Institution Medal. The experiments exploring ...”

“... More is involved, in other words, than the tendency of Irish nationalism to exaggerate the bliss of belonging: the problem has a linguistic aspect. Seamus Heaney clarifies this, because, while his nationalism incites him to cultivate a poetics of in-placeness, he respects, unlike Boland, the creative value of dislocation. As he says in ‘Place and ...”

“... political theme, sees the writer as doing a ‘particularly brilliant thing’ in Amphitryon; and Michael Cordner three times reiterates the word ‘masterpiece’ when introducing his edition of the play. There is an appealing American proverb, ‘If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?’ It seems to throw light on the difficult case of Dryden. During ...”

“... I liked my chances.Although I was born in Los Angeles and spent my earliest years in the Arcadian bliss of Coldwater Canyon, where my father had built a house, I’d never been back as an adult. I had also never had a first-class air ticket, never written a full-length screenplay and never been met at the airport by someone handing over $500 in cash. Because ...”

“... that or return the publisher’s advance), calling his debut Doings and Undoings. The columnist Michael Kinsley once observed that Al Gore was an old person’s idea of a young person, and Podhoretz was an old critic’s version of a young critic, publishing in the proper publications and bemoaning hairy barbarians like the Beats (‘The Know-Nothing ...”

“... a candidate for such rehabilitation will surprise no one who lived through those heady days. (Bliss was it in that dawn to drink herbal tea, read Adrienne Rich and have no penis!) The time seemed ripe for a major re-evaluation of a pioneering woman writer. There was only one problem, as Acocella, now gimlet-eyed, points out. Cather herself was a full-bore ...”

“... still eerily preserved at web.archive.org, is a Hallmark-card-style commercial for wedded bliss, decorated with sepia-toned bridal sprays and full of pictures of the Mediterranean cruise, the weekend trip to Martha’s Vineyard, and baby Lillian at every stage of her nine months of life. Its home page is addressed to ‘Dearest family and ...”

“... her mother died of cancer, and three years later her father also died: her eldest brother, Michael, took legal guardianship of Stein and their brother Leo. He was such a talented businessman and investor that Stein had a private income for life.Then followed the period of Stein’s education. In 1893, when she was nineteen, she enrolled at the Harvard ...”