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“... The mutual dependency of insiders and outsiders was established. The press, which has a foot in both camps, Grub Street being somewhere on the undrawable map of bohemia, has been serving it up to shock or amuse readers ever since. However much it may dislike it, bohemia is always complicit with convention. Its members are too individualistic to take ...”

“... that such a tag would seem appropriate to describe any other poet of the 20th century. Why her? John Ashbery’s praise for Bishop as a ‘writer’s writer’s writer’, whose work ‘inspires in writers of every sort’ an ‘extraordinarily intense loyalty’, seems apt. And Ashbery knew that to say such a thing might be to pay ‘an ambiguous ...”

“... possibilities, suddenly believing, as he said, ‘that mankind can be redeemed by beauty’. Five foot four inches tall, Nijinsky was full of grief and also full of exuberance. By the time he met Diaghilev he was already admired by every passing prince, a boy genius with feline limbs and a burgeoning sense of the power of immorality. Diaghilev, like the Baron ...”

“... off-message, tried to avoid him afterwards. Mirsky seems not to have registered that he had put a foot wrong. But over literary standards Mirsky did not always conform. He sedulously attended union meetings and voted for absurd resolutions; he omitted mention of Russian writers in exile – even of Tsvetaeva. In 1934, however, he provoked a series of blazing ...”

“... rose from the burning roofs of monasteries, not from animal funeral pyres; the crisis was not foot and mouth but rebellion. The Pilgrimage of Grace, as the convulsions came to be known, was the largest and most menacing of a succession of ‘Tudor Rebellions’, to quote the title of a seasoned classic by Anthony Fletcher (1968), recently revised by ...”

“... peace was embraced by thinkers who, in the early 16th century, included men like the theologian John Colet, Thomas More and their presiding genius, Erasmus. In England, policymakers bought into the idea of peace for pragmatic reasons as much as out of ideological conviction. As Henry VII’s former minister Edmund Dudley put it in 1509, in a treatise ...”

“... Sitting down in an upright position, I then began to examine myself, and now found that the right foot was severed from the ankle. This discovery did not shock me so much as the thoughts which quickly followed. For, as I could feel no pain, I did not know but what my body was in several parts, and I was not satisfied until I had examined every portion of ...”

“... shaming. ‘I denounce you as the Antichrist,’ he shouted, in the European Parliament, at Pope John Paul II. ‘Harlot’ was also a favourite, but this was rarely applied to an actual woman, being reserved for the Church of Rome. The same applied to ‘whore’, as in, ‘of Babylon’. The purity, in this uncracked patriarchy, of their own women, was a ...”

“... as he might be about what constitutes the break between then and now. Conversely, a great many foot soldiers in the free-market brigade would be surprised to learn that they were marching against institutions. It was Friedrich Hayek, after all, who argued that law was a condition of liberty rather than a constraint; that traditional institutions were ...”

“... some of them enormous and luxurious, like the one at Woodchester near Stroud, with its 8500 square-foot principal room. Some were no doubt occupied by Roman officials, but the majority must have been owned by Romanised Britain’s native aristocracy; these people would have spoken both Latin and proto-Welsh – rather like Tolstoyan aristos speaking French and ...”

“... ungulate things in public. Certainly a waterfall is more striking than the parking lot near its foot, but I wonder how it is that visitors can be so sure they saw what they were supposed to and so oblivious of what they were not. Wordsworth wrote in ‘Tintern Abbey’ of those rural places which, in ‘the din/Of towns and cities’, gave him ...”

“... the city of Van, where they lived through the massacres of 1915, then perilously escaped Turkey on foot to settle in Yerevan in Russian Armenia. In 1919 his mother starved to death in the famine. The children were taken in by an uncle, and friends helped to arrange for their passage to America at the beginning of the following year. Gorky always honoured ...”

“... muscle around him. (‘The primary pronoun at staff meetings was always “we”,’ the agent John Ptak says, ‘“We are doing this; we are doing that.” That never happened anywhere else.’) It is sometimes a symphony of bathos nonetheless, as one poor agent, brilliant but fearful, has to pay obeisance to some majorly talented nut-bag or other, just ...”

“... would be a terrible piece of phrasing even if it didn’t tap into a deep pop-cultural memory of John Travolta’s voice.) Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, one of Cioran’s translators, described her job in the introduction to On the Heights of Despair as equivalent to the experience of Jacob, who wrestled with an angel all night long – ‘the translator ...”

“... period. Bevilacqua refers to that period as the Enlightenment. As the intellectual historian John Robertson pointed out in The Enlightenment: A Short Introduction (2015), two distinct conceptions of the European Enlightenment are currently in circulation. According to the first, commonly held by philosophers and public intellectuals, the Enlightenment ...”