“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... began to be used by the king for the maintenance of public order in the 16th century, became more frequent in the 17th, and stopped suddenly in the 18th during the revolution. Among those imprisoned by lettres de cachet were the Marquis de Sade, at the request of his wife and mother-in-law, for rape and murder; the Comte de Mirabeau, at the request of ...”

“... It became ‘a success with readers before its embrace by critics’, according to its translator, Thomas Bunstead. Some attribute this popular response to its imaginative engagement with technology and mass culture. Others point to its formal adventurousness, or to the influence of a network of literary blogs (centred on Vicente Luis Mora’s Diario de ...”

“... complaint – let me say at the outset that Earthly Powers carries greater intellectual substance, more power and grim humour, more knowledge, than ten average novels put together. Kenneth Marchal Toomey, the narrator, is a novelist, born in 1890 and in his mid-eighties when we last hear from him. His lifetime takes in a lot ...”

“... as much the definitive question as the Grail was the definitive quest, but Jowett’s objection is more radically misconceived than any answer could be. The Grail is the ultimate object of desire: finding it would precisely be beside the point. Questing after it is an end in itself, as it is not for that other object of infinite search, the philosopher’s ...”

“... in a style that seeks neither to caricature them nor to elevate them. ‘Mr Wilkie places nothing more than the truth before us,’ one critic wrote. There are 14 figures in the picture, each with a life of its own, and yet the interior, brown and muddy and variously lit, has a character, too: a habitat but also a living museum of past and present ...”

“... years of their existence Shakespeare’s sonnets were private poems. Before the London bookseller Thomas Thorpe printed them in 1609 they circulated as manuscripts copied by hand, given from friend to friend. You might have kept yours in an English-made cabinet with drawers. Let’s think about varieties of ‘you’. If you are Helen Vendler you will be ...”

“... In libraries throughout Europe, weighty editions of Comte’s works remain with their pages uncut more than a hundred and fifty years after his death. Yet the residues of Comtean visions and conceptions still permeate many aspects of European thought and institutions. They may be discerned in the emphasis on social science as the supreme guide to public ...”