“... rubbish bins to try to make sense of him. And countless others have applied themselves to more conventional forms of criticism. Among the most deep and distinguished of this last kind of interpreter is Christopher Ricks, whose previous books include Milton’s Grand Style, Keats and Embarrassment, T.S. Eliot and Prejudice and Beckett’s Dying ...”

“... episode made me turn later to Buchan’s Life of Cromwell to refresh my memory of the character of Thomas, Lord Fairfax, who, like Greene, had friends in both political camps. Turning idly to the seemingly unpromising character of Cromwell himself, I could not help being struck by the aptness to Greene of phrase after phrase in Buchan’s final appraisal of ...”

“... What can have possessed Graham Greene? The answer, I suspect, is the ghost of Thomas Mann. The Swiss setting of Doctor Fischer of Geneva might be determined by some generic effluvium of Mann, a compound of his Magic (Swiss) Mountain, his post-war return to Switzerland and, perhaps, his rather landlocked position at the centre of European letters ...”

“... I knew no one at all who lived in the Palisades. Of course I knew the Mann house – the house Thomas Mann built in 1942 and inhabited until he left America a decade later – and had stayed there a few years ago. The house has been bought and refurbished by the German state.When, in the late 1980s, the Germans acquired the nearby Villa Aurora, the house ...”

“... and Katherine Philips, concentrates entirely on novelists. This is unwise, because there were more first-rate women poets than novelists in the period, and because poetry was still the place where ideas were growing most vigorously. Spender sees the importance of letter-writing as an approved activity for girls, but doesn’t follow this up by examining ...”

“... leaving everything behind him – clothes, books, papers – as if they weren’t his business any more.‘Remember,’ Graham told a friend, perhaps unnecessarily, ‘I am a great man for the drink, also my immediate life is disorganised and somewhat bemused. Sometimes I don’t know where I am.’ A further difficulty was indeed the matter of where he ...”

“... on works of literature. He produced dozens of editions of the work of novelists and poets and more than 50 monographs, including A History of Elizabethan Literature, A History of English Prosody, The English Novel, A History of the French Novel and, self-referentially, books about books about books – A History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe ...”

“... try to pass as entrepreneurs in a mostly non-existent start-up economy. On the Niger-Mali border, more than two hundred miles to the west, temporary villages have been built with EU and UN funding for those fleeing uncertainty in Mali, itself a consequence of Nato’s intervention in Libya. Women and men line up to have their fingerprints remembered by ...”

“... the front, and altogether enjoying a doughboy-to-doughboy rapport with his trench readership. Says Thomas Kunkel: ‘the paper, perhaps more than anything other than combat itself, coalesced the disparate, cobbled-together American units into an army.’Although one of Ross’s most effective ploys on Stars and Stripes was ...”

“... Chesterton, who wrote that ‘America is the only nation in the world founded upon a creed,’ but more importantly a central American tradition whose hero and spokesman is Lincoln. Lincoln is for Wills the prototype of the political moralist who is prepared to appeal to the Declaration against the status quo, even the constitutional status quo. From this ...”

“... with questions of biography. Given the fates that overtook his colleagues Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd in 1593 and 1594 – the one stabbed to death at 29, the other eventually dying after an extensive and painful interrogation – you could argue that Shakespeare might have felt that he had been living on borrowed time since the age of thirty. Ben ...”

“... morality says we must not cross. Usually the examples designed to call forth our intuitions are more artificial than this one – as in the famous trolley problem. But the phenomenon is real, and an inescapable part of human morality. I am interested in the question of how to decide what authority to give to these moral judgments, or perceptions, or ...”

“... People weren’t walking out in droves from the suburban cinema in which we saw Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film The Master because there weren’t droves there: just perhaps eight or nine people. But they did all walk out, in a slow trickle that started about halfway through the film. Staying there made us feel like loyalists in a lost cause – the future of film perhaps – but I’m not sure we were less bewildered or even less bored than those who had left ...”

“... the two sides paused at the moment of battle so that a hunting party could pass between them, or, more philosophically, to ask whether the Civil War had any effect on English history at all. Civil wars can be dismissed as the terrorist activities of small groups of individuals whose aggressive intolerance or violent insistence upon their own identities causes ...”

“... After a considerable pause he says: ‘I’m afraid that on this occasion I can only agree.’ Thomas Hobbes, political philosopher and inveterate royalist, has always had his admirers and loathers: from the moment his greatest work, Leviathan, was published in 1651, he has attracted reverence and spite, though rarely indifference, in equal measure. But ...”