“... Modern American writers have taken to heart Thomas Wolfe’s warning that ‘you can’t go home again.’ These days, being American or being modern or both seems to demand recognition of exile. The writer has to say goodbye to his folks at the earliest opportunity. That is only the first stage in his education in the estrangements of our times ...”

“... else’s speeches, they are dead and should not be resurrected. Moreover, if there is one thing more tedious than reading old political speeches, it is reading long accounts of how those speeches were composed and discussed. Mr Urban treats these speech-writing sessions as though he were disclosing how Milton composed Paradise Lost or Lincoln found the ...”

“... with a rejection slip. Day Lewis, it was predicted at the time of his appointment, would be much more on the ball. After all, had he not been limbering up for this honour for some years, with his clubs and his committees and his suave, actorly ‘recitals’ of gems from our poetic heritage? At my school in the Fifties, a regular item on the assembly ...”

“... twist, or are taken down to an altogether deeper level of thought. In Volume I, McCloskey and R.P. Thomas measure the cost to the American colonists of trade control by the British Navigation Acts, and end up with the figure of under 1.8 per cent of colonial income: a new low. As a price to pay for the services of British military forces, participation in ...”

“... carrying the coffin. Two older men I had seen with him were there too: the Shankill Road bomber, Thomas Begley, having been identified from dental records, the trio we had nearly filmed at the church were accompanying his modest mortal remains on their final journey. I had been waiting for them for hours, although of course I hadn’t realised I was going to ...”

“... another dancer took her place. When the curtain came down on Act Three a messenger arrived to tell Thomas Nijinsky that he had a daughter. He already had two sons: Stanislav, aged four, and Vaslav, later le dieu de la danse, who was two. Bronislava Nijinska grew up to be one of the few choreographers of any period whose works are still performed all over the ...”

“... carried by this beautiful cello.’ Kate Kennedy was in the audience. The cello, lost for more than eighty years in the black hole of the Holocaust, was there because of her book.When she was fifteen, Kennedy won a cello scholarship to Wells Cathedral School and began to practise with the intensity and single-mindedness of an elite athlete preparing ...”

“... have stretched beyond any known horizon, becoming one of the publishing world’s core subjects. More than six hundred books have been produced about the late movie star; that’s more books than you’ll find on Florence Nightingale, Princess Diana, Boadicea and Julia Roberts put together. So what kind of story is a story ...”

“... was often put in mind of ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ while reading Mark Ford’s study of Thomas Hardy. Ford doesn’t mention it (though he does refer to Baudelaire’s flaneurial poems), perhaps because that manifesto is too obvious, or too obviously theoretical: he prefers to build his case patiently, historically, in solid empirical ...”

“... among them students, who for obvious reasons prefer criticism to literature – who find theory more useful and also (which older people may find hard to believe) easier than the texts; the latter, rather than justifying the theory, are justified (if at all) by their tenuous and contingent relation to it. Allowing that E.K. Chambers’s original Oxford Book ...”

“... Yet contemporaries were convinced that the problem of atheism was both pervasive and growing. As Thomas Nashe put it, ‘there is no Sect now in England so scattered as Atheisme.’ The Spanish ambassador, Diego Sarmiento de Acuña, Count of Gondomar, reported in 1617 that some 900,000 people (more than a quarter of ...”

“... Aymé’s novel Le Passemuraille, about a man who can walk through walls, would have interested Thomas Caulfield Irwin (1823-92). Irwin is cited in Paul Muldoon’s To Ireland, I for a neighbourly dispute he was having with one John O’Donovan. ‘He says I am his enemy,’ Irwin wrote, ‘and watch him through the thickness of the wall which divides our ...”

“... empire was never forced to parry with any strategy of indirect rule – in this respect the colony more resembled New Zealand than India. There was no longer a clearly defined local elite to be cultivated by the British, so one had to be created. In the 19th century, Western capital didn’t reach much further than the coasts, but the missionaries had got ...”

“... bits of Frederick the Great. Carlyle has usually fared better in North America, where more respectable enthusiasts have never been scarce. He had enormous difficulty in getting a British publisher for Sartor Resartus, his first important book, written in 1831, and eventually settled for serial publication in Fraser’s Magazine in 1833-34, but the ...”

“... an empire, but it now trumpets itself as a nation, a People’s Republic. Empire has proved a more intractable subject for those Western Europeans who once swarmed greedily over large stretches of the globe, but whose dominion has become one with Nineveh and Tyre. For the English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish, as for the French, Spanish, Danish, Belgians and ...”