“... mustn’t come about as the result of an accident, but must involve fate or providence, which may in turn require the presence of numinous powers. W.B. Yeats could see nothing tragic about a car crash. Pure contingency – falling drunkenly from a fifth-floor window, for example – lacks the grandeur of the tragic. The protagonist must be of high social ...”

“... level. The idea, then, is that by changing the behaviour observed in a person’s handwriting, it may be possible to change other things about that person.This is the first of a series of ‘exercises’, small practice compositions – self-referential and encouraging, like this: ‘Now I’m trying to do three things: (1) keep the letters to a suitable ...”

“... or ‘bad’ or ‘nice’ or ‘evil’ person. Every action, every bit of behaviour, may reveal an essence. It’s a strange way of portraying characters who are basically innocent and not in the least weird.The person Alice is not explaining her breakdown to is Felix, who is both normal – that is, not a writer, not even a reader, but a worker ...”

“... and quiet sort’. The original, McCarthy tells us, had ‘in patient quiet sort’. This may not seem significant, but each small touch is helpful: ‘Few prominent composers in any era could be described as “mild”,’ she notes, ‘and in some ways it is a surprising, even discouraging, word to see in this context … It certainly does not fit ...”

“... and wooden knockers whose knockery meaning is, well, a saturnine resilience, that the faith in art may be more stirring that the art itself. Does an unstinted admiration for the record of courage and sacrifice require an unstinted admiration for the writing? Apparently it does. Nobody will say a word against the poems for fear of slighting the martyrdom. Yet ...”

“... interrupting each sentence as if the guest is choosing her words carefully, aware that someone may be listening behind the open door. As you read, you can’t help dreading the aggression hidden in the next unmarked phrase, a dread that reproduces the migrant’s sense of unlocatable threat: the feeling that every siren dopplering down the street is ...”

“... graves and English churchyards, they start up and throng around us in the paleness of their fall. May every schoolboy who reads this page be warned by the waving of their wasted hands, from that burning marle of passion where they found nothing but shame and ruin, polluted affections, and an early grave. The eponymous Eric, or Williams to his classmates, the ...”

“... his first book, The Missing, Andrew O’Hagan pauses over a perception he thinks his readers may find ‘a bit surprising’. It’s an intricate moment, since he thinks we are going to be surprised at the surprise he is describing. He is telling us that people who moved from Glasgow to the Scottish New Towns springing up in the 1960s hadn’t expected ...”

“... a sensitive part of her son’s anatomy? But if he was capable, why did he never marry? Brooke may have fallen in love as a young man, even becoming briefly engaged to a vicar’s daughter, and later there was a wealthy woman who became infatuated with him and lent him money. Barley concludes, however, that he was not much interested in women. On the other ...”

“... trade unionism. Scotland’s extraordinarily narrow and corrupt electoral system prior to 1832 may have encouraged some Scottish proconsuls like Thomas Maitland, Governor of Malta and the Ionian Islands, to take a particularly dim and manipulative view of colonial assemblies. Scotland’s churches produced distinctive forms of missionary activity, while ...”

“... own days, it certainly looks like it. How far the later Victorians and the Edwardians after them may be characterised as ‘military’ or ‘warlike’ is a nice question. It is true that an unmilitary, pacifistic body of opinion, the Cobdenite, internationalist main stream of Liberalism, was still strong enough in 1914 to hold Asquith’s cabinet away from ...”

“... with a single phone call.’ I don’t think he wants to make that call any time soon, but he may have to. I’m not sure the Israelis will quit this time, even if that call gets made. They love Bush in Israel; but they also know he’s a schmuck, even if he’s their schmuck, and over a barrel. There’s also a mid-term election coming up and Bush ...”

“... Humvees carry placards in Arabic and English warning drivers to stay 100 metres away or they may open fire. They don’t explain how anybody can keep their distance in the crowded traffic of central Baghdad. Iraqis spend their days watching for hidden dangers. As I came in from the airport on the main highway I had my eye on a car near me that was about ...”

“... molecules into a lattice ensures the crystal’s solidity and also its beauty: carbon atoms may organise themselves into diamond, or into soot. In a solid, the individual atoms are locked in place relative to one another, but a rise in temperature causes them to jiggle a bit so that each is slightly displaced. The positional ‘errors’ do not ...”

“... Alice Oswald, though she may not seem it at first, is an opinionated poet of ideas, and her poetry is ambitious in both form and scope. She writes taut poems about nature but refuses to call them ‘nature poems’. Her work is ‘full of hymns’, as Elizabeth Bishop said of her own, as well as pagan shouts and birdcalls ...”