“... reducing the action to minimal but memorable formulae, often concealing faces, as when the self-loathing of Judas is concentrated into a hunched back and a clenched fist, or when the Magi prostrate themselves like subject rulers in an Assyrian relief, or when Mary Magdalene is made to seem part of the rock on which the cross is raised. ‘Christ ...”

“... in their New York lofts, surrounded by big, painterly abstract pictures suggest lives in which self-reference has become burdensome. As time passed both Guston and Rothko started to paint darker pictures. In photographs of Monet at work on the Nymphéas in his vast studio at Giverny the nearby reality which is the source of what he is painting is ...”

“... but even more a Dudley, grandson of the ill-fated Duke of Northumberland and nephew of his sons Robert, Elizabeth’s Earl of Leicester, and Ambrose, Earl of Warwick. Ambrose was childless and, for as many years as Queen Elizabeth neither married Robert nor released him to marry anyone else, he was the presumed heir of ...”

“... disagreed about their first principles, but that moral philosophers based their arguments on self-evident truths. (An unclerical example is Sir William Temple, in his essay on Epicurus.) It was also commonly agreed that few men bowed voluntarily to the constraints of morality; nearly all had to be driven into it by supernatural warnings. Objectors, like ...”

“... indeed, and perhaps an excellent school for the inflexible later canons of neo-liberalism. Robert Lowell once said that he was glad not to have been a revolutionary when young, because it prevented him from becoming a reactionary bore in his old age. I see the point: the fact remains that in midlife and in 1968 he acted eloquently and well, as a ...”

“... scheme is the best way to shift the books. After all, you’d need to be a fairly besotted fan of Robert Ludlum to see any point in buying two indistinguishable copies of The Bourne Ultimatum. The idea may be that, unlike cans of beans, books are unique and personal purchases; readers’ personal bond with an author may be shaken, even with ...”

“... not denounce Nazi crimes without also denouncing Bolshevik crimes. Instead, he resorted to what Robert Ventresca characterises as ‘formulaic appeals to universal peace and brotherhood, and demands that the belligerents respect the rules of war’. The pope believed that informed hearers would recognise the targets of these generalisations well enough. And ...”

“... which usually changed considerably over time. Many of the early little magazines, far from being self-consciously ‘modernist’, were antiquarian throwbacks. Fin-de-siècle periodicals like the Yellow Book, the Chameleon and the Savoy took inspiration from William Morris, Charles Ricketts and other luminaries of the Arts and Crafts movement, favouring ...”

“... Kenneth Rexroth, the consigliore of radicalism, was master of ceremonies. Jack Kerouac, too self-conscious to read, acted as cheerleader: ‘Go! Go! Go!’ He passed out slopping gallon jugs of Californian Burgundy. There had been poetry readings in the Bay Area before this and the Six Gallery was hardly virgin territory. The space had once been a ...”

“... and academics. The latest is a handsome edition, complete with the requisite red ribbon, by Robert Alter, and it has arrived accompanied by a joyful noise, widely acclaimed in the press as the Psalms for Our Time. New translations of a classic text are either done as a criticism of the old translations (correcting mistakes, finding an equivalent that is ...”

“... heart of the Museum. His favourite seat is said to have been number L13.This last detail is not in Robert Henderson’s book, which leads me to wonder whether it’s wrong. Henderson, a former Russian curator at the British Library, knows everything there is to know about Lenin’s love affair with the BM, and tells it all. This is a level of detailed ...”

“... revolting memories to surge up before my closed eyes, almost burning the closed lids with fiery self-disgust, did I kill a moral nerve? To flinch from such memories, simply suppress them, might have been healthier. Is it right to overcome self-disgust? Well, in any case I learned the trick of it. Nobody told me; I found ...”

“... contributed to their rapid impoverishment. Political activity began with the evolution of economic self-help schemes organised on a communal basis and was hastened by the Jews’ need to defend themselves against the anti-semitic violence accompanying Tsarist repression of liberalism (which culminated in the pogroms of the early 1880s and those following the ...”

“... to chat up his glamorous French co-hostess, who consistently squelched him as a total creep. This self-caricature is no more Clive James (who by his own account is clearly as attractive to foreign ladies as the next celebrity) than Edna Everage and her remarks about tinted gentlemen is the sophisticated Mr Humphries. One of James’s most effective tricks is ...”

“... She provides a thumbnail sketch of his life, in the spirit of Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning, more text than fact, but is convinced that he failed to achieve the goal of his self-construction, ‘a place in the power structure’. She is fine on his medical ...”