“... Pascal, Rossetti and Mérimée, and includes some distinctly obscure pieces, such as an essay on Thomas Browne which is a small-scale masterpiece.The conventional image of Pater as a narrow aesthete or fastidious connoisseur is contradicted by these volumes. What emerges instead is a man of formidable learning and intellectual scope, a polyglot in modern as ...”

“... Alleyn, from the 1580s until the 1620s, and the age of latter-day heroic actors – Orson Welles, Donald Wolfit, Richard Burton and Albert Finney – from the 1930s until the 1970s.What mainly kept Marlowe himself alive in the popular imagination was the resonance between his sole English chronicle play, Edward II, with its explicit presentation of a sexual ...”

“... is one of those poets who make the writing of poetry into the subject of the poems they write,’ Donald Davie noted with some scepticism. ‘The commonsense view is that this drastically limits the importance and interest of what they write; and I think this is true.’ But Graham could conceive nothing more important or interesting:To be always alone is ...”

“... night. I meant what I said and it’s still how I feel.’ The previous day, Ryan had disinvited Donald Trump from his home state rally after the release of the 2005 tape on which Trump bragged about kissing and groping women. It was the culmination of the long festering feud between the Republican establishment’s pseudo-intellectual leader, the eminently ...”

“... Writing a BBC Third Programme review of Donald Hall’s Penguin Contemporary American Poetry exactly a month before she killed herself early in 1963, Sylvia Plath praised ‘the inwardness of these images ... the uncanny faculty of melting through the leaves of the wallpaper, through the dark looking-glass, into a world which one can only call surrealist and irrational ...”

“... the Bush team wouldn’t rush to give reconstruction contracts to France, Germany and Russia,’ Thomas Friedman grumbled in the New York Times, ‘but why shove that in their faces while we’re asking them to forgive Iraq’s debts?’ Or was the Wolfowitz directive a bargaining chip placed on the table as part of Baker’s negotiating strategy? Are the ...”

“... Indeed, if its canon is capacious enough to include Burns, Scott, Yeats, Joyce and Dylan Thomas, why did it never come to be known as ‘British literature’, a description that now sounds oddly stilted? A few 19th-century literary historians – Scots for the most part – happily used that phrase, but since then scruples about terminology have ...”

“... of its block. The American Folk Art Museum fell in its march west to Sixth Avenue, and only Saint Thomas Church has blocked its access east to Fifth.MoMA has added 47,000 square feet of exhibition space, a 30 per cent increase for a new total of 165,000 square feet in more than sixty galleries, at a cost of $450 million. Roughly half of this great sum came ...”

“... Tenth also showed up at various times. The First and the Ninth came back at season’s end, while Thomas Hampson sang the complete Mahler songs. Each of the major works, then, was performed at least once, and it wasn’t even an anniversary year. Beethoven’s little things, by contrast, received, by my count, seven performances – by the Philharmonic and by ...”

“... allowed the Republicans to win over Americans who might otherwise have been reluctant to vote for Donald Trump in the 2016 election. In one poll, 82 per cent of Americans said that the Supreme Court had been an important factor in their decision on how to vote; 81 per cent of white evangelical Christians voted for Trump, presumably at least in part because of ...”

“... the Green Zone without a military escort.) In February last year, the Washington Post reporter Thomas Ricks described one such facility, the Balad Air Base, forty miles north of Baghdad. A piece of (well-fortified) American suburbia in the middle of the Iraqi desert, Balad has fast-food joints, a miniature golf course, a football field, a cinema and ...”

“... resourced language would necessarily distort the subject. Writing about the work of Roy Fisher in Thomas Hardy and British Poetry, Donald Davie takes Fisher to be ‘restricting himself as self-denyingly as Larkin to the urbanised and industrialised landscapes of modern England’ and identifies a trade-off: ‘the poem is ...”

“... scratching that accounts for the monkey’s having it.) The worry about consciousness is that, in Thomas Nagel’s resonant phrase, there is ‘something that it’s like’ to be a conscious creature, but there is, presumably, nothing that it’s like to be a tree; and there is surely nothing that it’s like to be a rock or anything else that is ...”

“... of the new government was to be directed to what, following Aristotle and his Dominican mentor Thomas Aquinas, Savonarola called the common good. The ‘common good’ is a great soundbite, and Martines holds that only the self-interested – beneficiaries of corruption and tyranny – will stand against it. I wonder. There is Isaiah Berlin’s objection ...”

“... even ordinary relationships emotionally unmanageable: the wife of her Oxford philosophy tutor Donald MacKinnon made him stop seeing her; a crisis in her feelings for Anscombe caused her to destroy seven pages of her journals.Foot and Murdoch shared a flat in London and became very close, but drama followed. Foot had been having an affair with the ...”