“... road. A map is a memory: it’s a representation, a re-presenting of something that has been. It may look good on paper – and that’s already a fiddle, a projection of a sphere onto a plane – but it’s always a botched job and mapmakers know it. Cartographic language is loaded with confessions of omission and commission: map silences, map fictions, map ...”

“... Thomas is not interested primarily in the source of the pamphlets or how they were distributed. Robert Darnton and Daniel Roche, among others, have made extensive studies of the underground press, of the mechanics of clandestine production and distribution. Some of the pamphlets are translated here for the first time, but of course there is nothing new in ...”

“... around. They are, no doubt, in their cars, and another poet of weirdness, New England weirdness, Robert Lowell, knew also about cars: ‘A savage servility slides by on grease.’ There are antique shops in Stockbridge, where antique seems to mean the day before yesterday. And grand white wooden houses, behind evergreen trees, houses which turn out to be ...”

“... of fellow, a rugby blue who was known to call his wife by the name of George’. These teachers may look formidable in their black gowns but they’re kindly enough, insisting on the spirit of fairness. Of course, as McEwan is keen to let his younger readers know, corporal punishment still took place in this era, and ‘the honourable thing was to take your ...”

“... The Literary Brat Pack was a journalistic readymade, roping together a number of writers who may have scarcely known each other and treating them as a floating soirée. It was cartoonish and unfair to most of the individuals involved, but the thing about catchphrases is that once they click, they stick. And for a brief spell, Jay and Bret obliged the ...”

“... in’ or ‘taking out’, as porous or trussed, open or closed, is not clear, but that may be the point: like the two states that underlie them, these two strategies are bound up with each other. In this light his collecting was another way of being porous to the world, and his being porous another way to defend against images and objects – that ...”

“... men, courtiers, emperors, bores, Margaret Thatcher, fools, bad poets, frocks, personal enemies, Robert Walpole, reason, lust, excrement, travel, ex-soldiers, Americans, patrons, opera, religious orthodoxies, sexual deviants, shopkeepers, dildos, merchants, political parties and all self-deluded asses who believe themselves superior to the rest of ...”

“... general, waste good material on his correspondents. He was, he wrote to the Hungarian film-maker Robert Lazlo, ‘a bad letter-writer’. His replies were terse, polite and to the point. ‘I wish I could write you as interesting letters as you write to me, but nothing goes on outside my window except blue sea and mountains,’ he wrote to Skvorecky. His ...”

“... not come back. In the first poem in My Alexandria, ‘Demolition’, Doty invokes the ghost of Robert Lowell: many of the poems take their bearings from Lowell’s clotted diction, from what Doty calls his ‘ruthless energy’, from Lowell’s interest in burning the poem onto the page, heaping on adjectives to fuel the fire, invoking the Old ...”

“... Two ten-year-old boys, truanting from school, go to a Liverpool shopping-centre. They stole, or may have stolen, ‘a pen, a packet of batteries, Humbrol enamel paint tins, sausage rolls, party poppers ... a troll ... a packet of iced gems, a balloon, a plum, a pear, a banana’. Think of the young Jean-Jacques Rousseau, trying to steal apples; standing ...”

“... George Herbert, Thomas Ken, Watts, Charles Wesley – but many less celebrated names, such as Sir Robert Grant, William Walsham How, William Chatterton Dix: Grant (‘O worship the King, all glorious above’), the Scottish-born English MP who ended his life as Governor of Bombay; Thomas Olivers (‘The God of Abraham praise’), a cobbler who was converted ...”

“... in these abstract Modernists. One of the many things that is so interesting about him, and that Robert Ferguson illuminates in this first thorough biography, is his redescription of original sin as the best way of talking about ineluctable human limitations. In his own combative, unacademic way he was trying to work out why original sin, even in its secular ...”

“... on a map? No doubt financial constraints were the main cause of this information blackout, but it may also have seemed excusable because of our uncertainty about what sort of thing a translation of a poem is: how much, and what, we need to know in order to make sense of it. Translation necessarily cuts poems loose from their origins: it carries them not only ...”

“... used to describe above all the work of Natalie Zemon Davis (The Return of Martin Guerre, 1983) and Robert Darnton (The Great Cat Massacre, 1984). Microhistorians have turned to the verbatim records of interrogations kept in the law courts of early modern Europe (or at least those parts of Europe where Roman law procedures were followed) to reconstruct the ...”

“... servants, poor whites and planters looked down on the ‘natives’ and up to the bigwigs. It may be that Duras was raped when she was four; in any case, sex came into her life early on and it was a nasty business, although Adler refrains from any obvious psychoanalytical interpretations. From Cambodia the family moved to Cochin China, surviving on Mme ...”