“... title of another story), is the tone really as low as Wood implies? And is Updike’s prose style more, or less, purposeless and unmotivated than Wood’s, with its pointless cushion stolen from Updike’s married couple and its evasive use of the pronoun ‘one’? The involuntary human murmur has always been important for Updike, who has always sensed ...”

“... The United States must be the only country in the world to have lived for more than two centuries under a single written constitution. In France, monarchies and republics, each with its own constitution, have come and gone. Britain has yet to commit its constitution to paper. Americans revere their enduring Constitution as a symbol of national identity and the ultimate authority for resolving political controversies ...”

“... Eliot’s correspondence has so far reached only 1938 (he died in 1965), but there are already more than seven thousand pages of his letters in print, with hundreds more available on tseliot.com, and many thousands yet to come. Edited for the most part by John Haffenden, the edition builds on the collection made by the ...”

“... or sign up for the sultan of Oman’s counterinsurgency against the communist Dhofar rebellion. More sedentary readers could buy a ‘Free Cambodia’ T-shirt, donate to an anti-Sandinista relief fund, support the search for POWs, stock up on Confederate paraphernalia, get a TEC-9 assault pistol, hire a hitman or order dynamite by the truckload. The ...”

“... be made, but possessing apparently no sense of wonder and not much of historical perspective, Thomas Franck doesn’t seem to realise how extraordinary a claim it is. Whoever, anywhere, before our own later 20th century, thought that the world could be ‘fair’? Was ineradicable unfairness not the common perception? And if this has been ...”

“... night. Broken and disrupted sleep could be a symptom of illness or a mark of being ill at ease: Thomas Bentley, of Turvey in Bedfordshire, consulted the astrologer because he found himself ‘Troubled in his sleepe with dreaming of Children’. To draw the curtains around a bed and prop one’s body against a bolster was to court spiritual, medical and ...”

“... Indeterminacy Principle. But that is a cultural curiosity: Wittgenstein’s work is scarcely more accessible now than it was thirty-five years ago. It is too easy to embrace the solutions without understanding the problems. As David Pears observes, ‘when we read one of Wittgenstein’s discussions of philosophical illusions, there are two things which ...”

“... blameless dead who’d found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. My mother, who had more faith in the power of prayer and her own careful parenting, would often override his prohibitions. ‘Oh, Ed,’ she would argue over dinner, ‘leave them be! They’ve got to learn some things for themselves.’ Once she told him, ‘don’t be ...”

“... it . . . the minute Odysseus behaves this badly, the stupidity of the Cyclops begins to look more like benign naivety.’ Hall’s descent into political correctness here makes Polyphemus seem a bit too benign. She remarks that Odysseus and his men feast off Polyphemus’ cheese like Penelope’s suitors freeloading on Odysseus’ household back in ...”

“... the suavity, the power to project fantasy without losing likeness, which was the achievement of more fashionable and upper-class 18th-century face-painting. If Gainsborough had developed the neat manner of Mr and Mrs Andrews, rather than a feathery allusiveness of touch, he too might have been a provincial painter. Wright painted middle-class people ...”

“... signs and wonders. They inspire large gestures towards New Beginnings. In 1900, the year in which Thomas Keneally’s most recent novel situates itself, the separate Australian colonies were reeling from economic depression and the worst drought since European settlement began in 1788. There were catastrophic losses of cattle and sheep, wheat plummeted to ...”

“... staggering mule-kicks ever meted out by an author to his readers. Bear in mind that the poem is more than 21,000 lines of blank verse – about twice the length of Paradise Lost. It was published in four monthly instalments, each containing three books of the poem, which appeared from November 1868 to February 1869. Browning, like Melville, was asking Jonah ...”

“... her head and smoked it, and there would have been an end of your story.’ But there was an even more fundamental objection to Flynn’s plot. Was he ‘aware of the fact that James Brooke had been severely wounded in India, and deprived of his manhood’? Flynn laughed and shrugged. ‘You can’t have a motion picture without love,’ he said. ‘And you ...”

“... a gate set in the cemetery wall to the Mary Rankin Wing of St Pancras Hospital. As a young man, Thomas Hardy supervised the removal of bodies from part of the cemetery to make way for the trains. He placed the headstones round an ash tree sapling, now grown tall, where I stop sometimes to look at the stones crowding round the old tree like children ...”

“... be stipulated. Compared to this urgent caveat, the need to increase dosage over time was little more than a footnote: for most classical authorities it merited less attention than the other universal side-effect of regular use, constipation. Early Arab sources are the first to foreshadow the modern phenomenon of the addict. A 12th-century doctor noted that ...”