“... more benignly, the wish to be looked after). Wanting to be defined by our sexuality may only be symptomatic of our wanting to be defined. But the unconscious, as Freud described it, always has a blurring effect (you thought you knew what you were saying and then, by making a slip or a pun, you say something else). In other words, psychoanalysis ...”

“... of an unseemly trade are chanced, repeated and then passed on to new arrivals. Recent events may yet prove the truth of this cynical interpretation of our body politic. But already – together with the party conferences that preceded them – they reveal a state desperate for change yet incapable of achieving it, a political culture in which form and ...”

“... buildings in Naples, organised by the private charity Napoli Novantanove. The two open days in May last year attracted a million visitors. Few of them, I suspect, came from the UK, where the episode was little noticed, and where Naples, sadly, is now little loved, but the success of this initiative has been well publicised in Italy. It coincides with a ...”

“... also that some of these notables must have forgotten what the old days were really like. This may be another feature of the bizarre transition now under way: once an over-starched taboo-culture has collapsed, within a short time surprisingly few can recall how it felt and functioned. Back in the Sixties, for example, the Scotsman had a faithful operative ...”

“... after the 2001 general election to his resignation over the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. He may have wanted to get the book out quickly while Iraq, WMDs and Hutton still dominate the headlines, but, more important, writing exclusively about the Blair second term allows him to construct a narrative of political disillusion shorn of awkward questions ...”

“... across different minds and times – the sense that we are all one, and that mind and matter may not be entirely separate – is the ground-tone of Hill’s earlier work. The remarkable unstoppling of Hill’s muse in the later 1990s was partly the result of his being prescribed lithium for depression. ‘How is it tuned, how can it be untuned,/with ...”

“... violent images all the time, on television, on the internet, in movies and in video games. We may encounter the videos inadvertently, watching the news for example, but they don’t drop from the sky. No one who sees them lives in a state of innocence. In film after film, TV show after TV show, the police are dogged, persistent, sometimes clever, always ...”

“... Protection Agency, is a more committed climate change denier, though even he is circumspect. Last May, when he was Oklahoma’s attorney general, he wrote a piece in the National Review attacking Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which he was in the process of suing the EPA over when Trump nominated him to lead it: ‘Scientists continue to disagree about the ...”

“... for voyages as a form of literature, partly because the New Criticism ignored them; yet he may be battering at an open door, for surely the great mass of readers, who do not give a damn for the New Criticism, have never ceased to agree that ‘these narratives ... are a special kind of writing with distinctive values of its own.’ And it is likely ...”

“... failure at the headwaters of the Missouri – is another question. Lewis’s subsequent slump may have been nothing more, or less, than the anti-climax which many people experience after a burst of intense, dangerous activity, especially when the occasion producing the initial steeled response has fallen out of the public attention. A veteran of the ...”

“... so sold on the Early Victorian ethos? Interesting though unanswerable questions. What matters, it may be thought, is Browning’s audacity in denying us, in the closing verse, the full rhyme we’ve been so emphatically led to expect. Asymmetry, discontinuity – all the mileage that Modernist artists were to get from these principles is foreshadowed in this ...”

“... faith in the canon and turning to different forms of cultural studies. But their disillusion may be premature. English poetry has not been as one-sidedly conservative as is frequently supposed, and needs defending against many of its defenders – whether overt reactionaries or ‘liberal humanists’ who display an extraordinary complacency about the ...”

“... diaries are by tradition kept in the office of the present chief at Century House, Lambeth. It may be that, like some of his predecessors, Mr Curwen (who can expect his knighthood within the year) uses the diaries to entertain visitors with their colourful details of Cumming’s pre-First World War disguises. These disguises, however, are not to be taken ...”

“... itself. Smollett’s translation of 1755, now reissued, pre-dated this capture, and perhaps it may be said that the translation assisted a romantic reading of Cervantes which it was also equipped to avert. His opinion of the work, expressed a little earlier in the Preface to Roderick Random, was ‘classical’ enough: Cervantes’ ‘inimitable piece of ...”

“... is at times an equivocal business. There’s always the question of what, exactly, of value they may tell us, of what there is that makes their publication more than merely intrusive. Forster lived a long time, and there’s some sorry reading in the second of these volumes. To Joe Ackerley in 1947 from the USA: ‘the view from the window is the Californian ...”