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“... it was as though my schoolfellows and I had stumbled into the pages of ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’, ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook’ or another of the horrid inventions in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. Led past stacks of disintegrating coffins, from which skulls and yellowing bones spilled across the dusty floor, we were introduced to the crypt’s ...”

“... may be applied here, by one whose sole privilege is in a grateful admiration, to Walter Savage Landor. A reader would do well to trade in Room’s thumbnail-Landor (‘colourful’, ‘apparently ungovernable temper’, ‘irascible’) and ask instead please for what Room does not supply, a simple identification of the praiser of Shakespeare, upon ...”

“... Between the raised talon of the right hand rests an object – At rest, like a pale island in a savage sea – a child’s head, Immobile, authentic, torn and bloody – The point of repose in the picture, the point of movement in us. Here, for once, Davie feels, Enright accepts that great art is ‘amoral, unleashing energies which do not stop short ...”

“... the proposal to establish an Anglo-Saxon-based school of English at Oxford, the moral philosopher Thomas Case protested that ‘an English School will grow up, nourishing our language not from the humanity of the Greeks and Romans, but from the savagery of the Goths and Anglo-Saxons. We are about to reverse the Renaissance.’ Not for the first time, an ...”

“... was born in 1917, awarded the Nobel Prize in 1972 (the first German writer thus honoured since Thomas Mann in 1929 – Hermann Hesse having adopted Swiss citizenship, and Nelly Sachs Swedish) and died in 1985. He was an early instance, an avatar, of the writer as right thinker, as influencer, like Rushdie, like Solzhenitsyn, like Pasolini: his was the ...”

“... in the 1920s by the political and legal scholar Carl Schmitt. Having written on dictatorship, Thomas Hobbes, and political Romanticism, Schmitt turned his attention to the newly established liberal democracy of the Weimar Republic. He disliked the regime, and in particular he disliked the constitution, though he did not want to see it abandoned ...”

“... if not outright “tragedy”.’ In contrast, Charlotte Margolis Goodman’s Jean Stafford: The Savage Heart is a respectful literary biography written from a feminist perspective, which draws extensively on Stafford’s unpublished novels and stories in the University of Colorado. Goodman sets Stafford’s fiction in the context of American writing of the ...”

“... Between the raised talons of the right hand rests an object – At rest, like a pale island in a savage sea – a child’s head, Immobile, authentic, torn and bloody – The point of repose in the picture, the point of movement in us. And with that line, of course, we come up against the moral crux. The movement prompted in us by a child’s bloody head ...”

“... The last label is absurd – Elias had a rooted dislike of both colonialist arrogance and noble-savage romanticism. Yet The Civilising Process has an insistent logic running through it, a strong whiff of evolutionary humanism. The distinction on which the book rests, between a rational, refined, mechanical French ‘civilisation’ and an ...”

“... down to the deepest terrors and desires. Jonson’s most certainly have not.’ Insofar as Bruce Thomas Boehrer’s resourceful sifting of Jonson’s plays focuses on the network of tentacular roots animating their language, it might be seen as a salutary transatlantic redressing of an earlier American deformation. His concern to explore the furthest reaches ...”

“... that ‘possibly’ is). In 1838, the Preston United Independent Harmonic Brass Band wrote to Mr Thomas Clifton of Lytham Hall in Lancashire: Sir, by the desire of a Fue Respectable Friends of yours in Preston has caused hus to write to you with a Petition as a Solitisation for a job of Playing at your Dinnering Day as they told hus is taking place on ...”

“... Victorian historians vied with each other to compose panegyrics to him. The biography written by Thomas Hughes, the author of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, said that Alfred disproved once and for all the thesis that Christianity was ‘no faith for fighters’: while the Vikings at Ashdown passed the night before the battle singing the ‘Death-Song of Ragnar ...”

“... Arcadia. Shakespeare complete. Raleigh’s History of the World. Bacon complete. The Bible. Sir Thomas Browne complete. Milton, including the prose works. Cowley, Waller and Denham. Dryden, including the prose works and the translations. Samuel Butler complete. Pope complete, including the Iliad and the Odyssey. Addison complete. Steele complete. Swift ...”

“... are picked clean and the clean bones gone/They shall have stars at elbow and foot,’ as Dylan Thomas wrote: ‘And death shall have no dominion.’ On the other hand, decaying flesh could transmit the holiness of the soul it once sheltered through contact relics. Dirt from a grave, water in which a saint had been washed for burial, straw from his bed, or ...”

“... and Tito turned almost wholly to Tito’s advantage. Stalin’s blockade of Yugoslavia was as savage as the blockade of Berlin, and just as ineffective. The multiple assassination attempts on Tito failed. Yugoslavia did not become isolated. Indeed, Tito expanded Yugoslavia’s global reach; he became one of the founders of the non-aligned movement and ...”