“... allegorical and what is not. The story of Europa and the bull, which Calasso recounts on the first page of The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, has obvious allegorical possibilities, since the bull was the emblem of Minoan civilisation. The story might conceivably have less to do with female violation than with the magic of naming, which is central to our ...”

“... now suddenly he can heal, all by himself; he cures the cripple Edward, but dies in the process. Tim takes over his father’s circus act until his grandparents die too, and he inherits their Wiltshire farmhouse, where he lives alone at the end of the novel. He no longer reads his English books, not because he doubts their value, but because he has already ...”

“... isn’t interested in new scholarship on the period unless it’s biographical. Hardly a page of this book is informed by developments in historical thinking since the 1970s; he makes his case using whatever materials come to hand most easily. A chapter on religion is overwhelmingly about the parliamentary debates in the 1880s on whether the atheist ...”

“... use of the word hoor with a range of examples from the writings of Patrick Kavanagh, Brian Friel, Tim Pat Coogan, Oliver St John Gogarty, Neil Jordan and Hugh Leonard. It’s a method that seems to be at once academically sound and, for those committed to a long weekend in England and Wales carrying only one bag and one book, perfect for a bit of one-way ...”

“... that its title song (sung by Remick) is his ‘personal statement’. This makes for a nervous page in the book, discussing the lyric that concludes: What’s hard is simple, What’s natural comes hard. Maybe you could show me How to let go, Lower my guard, Learn to be free. Maybe if you whistle, Whistle for me. ‘To believe that “Anyone Can ...”

“... living in Australia. She then wrote a series of fantastical tales modelled on Boccaccio. An 800-page fictional study of the banking industry in Paris earned praise from reviewers for an understanding of ‘bucketeering and grain options, of foreign-exchange speculation and account gathering’ that was ‘little short of miraculous’. She turned to ...”

“... lines. The comparative expansiveness of his later poems, one of which goes so far as to turn the page, does little to moderate the impression of a costive and sometimes caustic talent, a minimalist who writes only the poems that he comes on (or which come to him) by happy accident, which means rarely. The lack of a pragmatic, Johnsonian go-get-’em approach ...”

“... ought to be neat without looking too familiar, the little marks spread ‘randomly’ across the page – a couple of lowish numbers, a couple of medium numbers, a couple of highish numbers. This belief is no different from the belief of those who seem to feel that the winning sequence should look both neat and familiar (1 2 3 4 5 6). The intention is to ...”

“... and reproduced in a memoir by Lord Woolton, minister of food during the war, as well as on this page, drove home the point that if two or three supply routes were cut, hunger and shortages at home were sure to follow. (Note the threat to jam.) Woolton’s department took charge of the supply and distribution system, effectively buying up food in Britain and ...”

“... of social and political habits which can be unsettled and perhaps dislodged by radical work on the page. For some of these ‘elective outsiders’, as Sinclair calls them, quality time at the keyboard is conceived as a challenge to power: the poem is a flamboyant descent into the street, part Pentecost, part June Days – old allegiances among the poets run ...”

“... to ‘around 10,500 pages of text and 1200 pages of adverts, assuming an average of 300 words per page; this equals some 3.1 million words to read … about equivalent to reading 21 books of the length of Ulysses.’ Attempting to honour modernism’s internationalist ambition makes the task even more onerous, as every country sprouted its own magazines. A ...”

“... not Lord Justice Bingham, after all, at public school with one of the Price Waterhouse partners, Tim Hoult, who gave evidence to him? The Bingham Report, moreover, has large holes in it caused by the secrecy and confidentiality which Kerry denounces. A glorious example is Section F, headed ‘The Intelligence Agencies’. The section starts: ‘For security ...”

“... adultery between his wife and Dale Kohler. Dale Kohler enters Roger’s Version on the first page, where we find him sitting in Roger’s office in the Divinity School, disturbing Roger’s cultivated academic complacency with a project to prove the existence of God by means of a complex modelling procedure in computer graphics. Roger dislikes Dale’s ...”

“... and below this a crudely incised figure of a skeleton with a walking stick, like something from a Tim Burton movie. On the recto of folio 105, under the date 3 November 1448, is the entry found by Milanesi. It is the first of nine burials listed for that day. A cursory examination reveals two things: first, that the name of the dead painter is not Domenico di ...”

“... It’s not so clear-cut in tennis. It takes time to evolve.’ Federer lost his next match to Tim Henman.‘Every successful player compromises their entire childhood to make it,’ the former Irish number one Conor Niland writes in The Racket, his memoir of life as a journeyman pro. ‘But so does every unsuccessful player too.’ Niland, like his more ...”