“... Life by Other Means, derives from an Enright poem called ‘Poetical Justice’ which muses rather more ambiguously on the relations between art and life than the stirring phrase might suggest in isolation. Dr Johnson, one of Enright’s touchstones, records how he was so shocked by Cordelia’s death in King Lear that he could never bear to reread the ...”

“... at interrogation centred upon food rather than sex. English diarists – Evelyn as well as Pepys, Thomas Turner as well as Parson Woodforde – confide their meals to paper as readily as their other concerns. One reason why Keats makes better reading than Shelley is that he had a superior gust for eating and drinking, and found a language for it in verse and ...”

“... Castelnau one of us or one of them? In the dangerous, knife-edge politics of the time, was France more than half a friend or more than half an enemy? Where did de Castelnau stand in relation to his master, Henri III, or to his own servants? He had been using the diplomatic bag, which passed from Paris through Salisbury ...”

“... man’ is ‘less tolerant of babydom’, according to Bosanquet, while the ‘working man’ is more like a woman: ‘Forced into close contact with the newcomer from its first arrival, and must take his share in ministering to its needs; and thus he learns almost as soon as its mother to be on terms of intimacy.’The ‘intimacy’ of poor ...”

“... man working for a large company’ was not the sort of plot point to get a reporter begging for more. ‘It has implications,’ Heller added. For the next 12 years Heller worked with this material as it emerged in ever darker and more dismal tones. It seems to have come one painful sentence at a time. He distracted ...”

“... the way of the raccoon and beaver, and felt his heart whirled aloft by some hand or talon: Oh no more, he reasoned, will I scramble blindly between settlement and clearing, mocked by the melancholy loon. Off, off, again off, ye buckskin garments! How it glints, my rifle, in the sun, as it arcs towards the lake. And listen – on the stony beach the ripples ...”

“... In the opening pages of Thomas Mann’s novel, Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, the hero debates a question which has always worried him: which is better for the careerist, to see the world small or to see it big? The small view has its attractions. Great statesmen and empire-builders must see the world this way, Krull thinks: like a chessboard, with human pieces that can be manoeuvred coldly and boldly as the player rises above the mass of mankind ...”

“... from a speech by Pericles in an English translation of The History of the Peloponnesian War that Thomas Hobbes published in 1629. The sentiment expressed is one that haunted him throughout his intellectual endeavours. Hobbes regarded himself as one of the first philosophers to engage in genuine political science, by which he meant not only the analysis and ...”

“... which favoured Jewish readmission. MPs are unlikely to have been reassured by the activities of Thomas Tany, ‘Theaureau John’. Informed by nocturnal revelations that God had commissioned him to gather the dispersed Jews and lead them to the Holy Land, Tany proceeded to establish assembly camps at Greenwich and Lambeth, ‘tents for every tribe, and the ...”

“... signatories found themselves hunted regicides. Ludlow left London for Dieppe in August and spent more than three decades in exile, in Geneva, Lausanne, Vevey and Bern. Revolutionary change in 1689 prompted him to risk returning to England, but this led to a fresh arrest warrant and Ludlow retreated again to Switzerland, where he died in 1692. Whalley and ...”

“... of which one is reminded by both Mordecai Richler’s anthology and Ernestine Schlant and Thomas Rimer’s collection of essays. There’s the fact, among many other examples, that US air bases on Japanese territory, acquired at the end of the Second World War, were used against Vietnam. There is the durability of Central European anti-semitism. And ...”

“... obedience to which constitutes the highest form of freedom, but his monologue also points to a more general problem: the ways we confound words and things, deceived by the multiple meanings and hidden implications of seemingly basic political concepts.Political theorists have long been aware of the dangers lurking in the superficially innocuous term ...”

“... Life and Letters, but also in smaller collections containing his correspondence with one or more persons – for example, Edward Garnett, William Blackwood and Cunninghame Graham. Early letters to Polish friends and relations have been translated, and a series of about a hundred to Marguerite Poradowska appeared in the original French. However, it seems ...”

“... so, since defining this entity in its own terms has always been problematic and is fast becoming more so.In part, and paradoxically, this is because the British nation has experienced such comparatively stable development since its invention in 1707. The French and the Irish can assert their common identity (whether it exists or not) by reference to recent ...”

“... The US literary world can be divided into two camps: those who think Thomas Pynchon is a very clever guy, and those who also think he’s a great writer. As it happens, I’m of the former camp. While I admit that Pynchon’s writing is packed with all sorts of ideas, ultimately the novels strike me as more crudités than smorgasbord: the appetisers keep coming (and coming, and coming), but the main course never arrives ...”