“... of Barr’s book one needs some idea of what he is attacking. Canonical criticism is not a one-man operation, but its most distinguished theorist, and Barr’s main target, is Brevard S. Childs, a professor at Yale. Barr is Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford and a scholar of immense distinction, so this is not a battle of pygmies. The arguments of Childs ...”

“... will be the ‘men of conscience’ like Zola and Sartre. There is and always will be the just man, one against the rest, resisting the forces of history and its alleged diktats, like Camus and Julien Benda. In a word, it’s like a comedy which, instead of Columbine, Harlequin and Pantaloon, would have a set number of stock figures that have been defined ...”

“... whole of Great Britain to the remarkable point of being officially boycotted (as if I were a one-man enemy country)’, and his memoir wasn’t published in the UK. The paperback I read must have been bought by my father when he visited America.What struck me most at the time was Hecht’s account of his period as a Zionist activist in the 1940s (this, or at ...”

“... When Captain Paul Voulet presented his plan for a new expedition to the minister of colonies in January 1898 he was accorded a good reception. He was, after all, a promising young officer whose previous mission to French Sudan had shown exemplary firmness towards the natives, and only a few months earlier the president of the republic, Félix Faure, had given him an audience ...”

“... to ‘the elimination of ego’. Concrete poetry, too, treats words and letters as things. Haroldo de Campos, a Brazilian concrete poet, called such art ‘verbivocovisual’ because ‘the materiality of the poem … and its visual appearance’ can’t be separated from what it means. (You could say the same about The Very Hungry Caterpillar, if it weren’t ...”

“... doubt that Volkov’s book is substantially a fabrication. Laurel Fay herself delivered the coup de grâce in a meticulous piece of scholarship published in a collection of largely sceptical essays, A Shostakovich Casebook, edited by Malcolm Hamrick Brown, in 2004. Elizabeth Wilson sides with Fay, while observing with regret that ‘the so-called ...”

“... only Cuban matters but those of all nations came into Castro’s critique, from the insufficient de-Nazification of West Germany to French atrocities in Algeria. In later decades, his speeches would become gruelling national rituals, but almost to the end they remained a reliable point of resistance to US triumphalism.Castro’s exit​ from New York was ...”

“... by E.C. Bentley, the inventor of the form: ‘He said, “if anyone calls/Say I’m designing St Paul’s’ (a building which he completed in 1710). Hill’s poem lives locally in these small, self-delighting verbal graces that can have the air of deft contrivance or happy accident, while its more momentous and even ominous compulsions work themselves out ...”

“... of all observers, owner of arguably the best-known entirely plain face in the world, the richest man on the planet: Bill Gates III. According to Cringely, top-level computer jocks are always, without exception, either hippies or nerds; the lank-haired, anal-retentive, oversized-glasses-wearing, non-fantastically-good-at-teeth-brushing Gates is the apotheosis ...”

“... radical heretics? Spinoza was a republican democrat and a supporter of the politician Johan De Witt (1625-72), an opponent of the House of Orange. After De Witt’s death, the aristocratic Orange faction took power and restored a more conventional social order (which was subsequently imposed on Britain when one of ...”

“... by that old stand-by called, ‘ambivalence’; a more generous view of Carl Schorske’s Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (1980), or indeed Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities, might have yielded a more abundant answer. On the other hand, Freud’s warm if critical admiration of England (which, he ...”

“... an itinerant singer whom he had invited into his hotel for a drink. The waiters sneered at the man and put the couple in a room by themselves, away from the hotel guests. Earlier, Tolstoy had been incensed by the fact that the public had listened to the singing, but then turned away without giving the performer any money. The singer himself proved to be ...”

“... replying in 1915 to a letter from Karl Schwarzschild, was ‘unaware that he was writing to a dead man’. It’s a true statement – if Einstein had known he was writing to a dead man he would presumably have stopped – but the piquant hint of mystery is misleading. Schwarzschild was commanding an artillery unit on the ...”

“... They steep us in the decors of revivalism, from the marmoreal bondieuseries of Ary Scheffer and Paul Delaroche to the pity-inducing poor folk engraved by Gustave Doré. Sustained by these and by the louring atmospheric landscapes of the Hague School – Goupil & Co’s version of ‘modern painting’ – van Gogh forged himself a personal ...”

“... and Churchill at the Anfa Conference in Casablanca; in 1945, aged fifteen, he was decorated by de Gaulle. Not long after his coronation he was welcomed in Washington by President Kennedy; France, for its part, had high hopes that he would manage its postcolonial interests in the Maghreb – he was known to be astute and an implacable adversary.He had been ...”