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“... the water-doctors who battened on the spa trade spread the notion that self-treatment held out as little hope of salvation as saying one’s prayers at home and never going to church. The ritual and the socialising, along with the change of climate and scenery, were part of the cure, if not all of it, as even the doctors sometimes admitted. For about twenty ...”

“... atomism. He discovered the Arabian Nights, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and the tales of Edgar Allan Poe, whose style he imitated. Lovecraft’s fiction can often seem like a pastiche of the morbidly concrete side of Poe. In Poe’s ‘Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’, for example, a nearly dead man in a mesmeric trance is reduced to a ‘liquid mass of ...”

“... gardening has tended to be overlooked. Ten years ago a similar double biography by the late Mea Allan first brought them to general notice and redressed the balance by uncovering their importance in this other capacity. That book, however, veered uncomfortably between journalism and scholarship, and it is no great surprise to find that the research has had ...”

“... Wisely, he brought a dowry: information which rolled up a Soviet spy ring in Canada, and nailed Allan Nunn May as one of the first atomic traitors. But he had no Canadian ‘controller’ to shortcut bureaucracy on his behalf. Had it not been for the Air Force sergeant, a providentially understanding secretary in the Canadian Crown Attorney’s office, and ...”

“... education’ (Dinesh D’Souza in 1991), dedicated to ‘the closing of the American mind’ (Allan Bloom in 1987). The sense of embattlement is palpable in a recent anthology of articles from the New Criterion, whose editor, Hilton Kramer, gazes back on the founding of the magazine in 1982: The ‘long march through the institutions’ that had been ...”

“... aware of the philosophical history of the inner touch, called coenaesthopathy. We feel too little, or too much, the fact of our own feeling. Much of the most fascinating historical material in The Inner Touch – as distinct from Heller-Roazen’s careful yet audacious reading of literary and philosophical works – has to do with such disorders of the ...”

“... or another of the sprawling late Roman world: the story of the fall of Rome inevitably says too little about the eastern Rome that did not fall; the rise of Byzantium and the making of Orthodoxy marginalises the West; the birth of Europe hardly ever does justice to anything south of the Alps and Pyrenees. Traina drops casually in on a series of different ...”

“... to blot out the reality of his mother’s death, it is drawn not from his life, however, but from little details in his fiction, read as if these were details in his life. It is portentously noted, for example, that in a few of his novels and stories the age of a boy when his mother dies is not exactly Bellow’s age. Not 17, mind you, but 16 or 15. ‘It is ...”

“... if necessary by violence. One notices, however, that difference of sex causes surprisingly little distrust, by contrast. There is very little hostility or violence between men and women in these stories; it is largely confined to members of the same sex. On several occasions in very different contexts, a man smites ...”

“... in Woody Allen, too. The outline of the life is simple enough, and has been laid out many times. Allan Stewart Konigsberg was born in the Bronx in 1935, although the family was living in Brooklyn, where he grew up. Dilatory and bored in school, he spent much of his time at the movies. He rose to unlikely success by writing gags for newspaper columns and ...”

“... and set in a lighthouse). Maskelyne, whose Magic Gang never existed outside his memoirs, was of little practical use to the camouflage unit to which he was seconded, but was nevertheless encouraged, for a time at least, to take credit for achievements that would boost confidence at Allied High Command.It is one of the curious qualities of the lighthouse ...”

“... 2006, there was something about it in my local newspaper. The owner was an 86-year-old man called Allan Chappelow, a recluse who had rarely left the house in his later years. He had been found dead under a metre high pile of papers in a room filled with rotting furniture. A suspect was apprehended: a Chinese exile called Wang Yam. He was charged with ...”

“... why, in much greater detail and in a richer historical context. James Thornhill’s comparatively little-known versions of ‘modern’ life are tellingly invoked. Then there is an amazingly learned search for the sources of David’s Oath of the Horatii. The trail leads through Gluck, Garrick, the ballet-master Noverre, Lavoisier, Beaumarchais and (less of a ...”

“... as ‘The Experience of Elsewhere’ which end this book, you start to see why. How much or little judges make of human rights seems to have not a lot to do with the tools the legislature hands them. We know that since its 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms came on stream, Canada’s polity has been profoundly altered both by the decisions of the ...”

“... be grudging not to salute in passing an English example cited in the Compendium, enterprising if a little short on stamina compared with Perec’s monster, from Alastair Reid: ‘T. Eliot, top bard, notes putrid tang emanating, is sad. I’d assign it a name: “Gnat-dirt upset on drab pot toilet.” ’ The Oulipo has been going about its palindromic and ...”