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“... from her chariot, stripped naked, dragged to the church, and inhumanly butchered by the hands of Peter the reader, and a troop of savage and merciless fanatics: her flesh was scraped from her bones with sharp oyster shells, and her quivering limbs were delivered to the flames.’ This is Gibbon’s description of the murder of the mathematician and ...”

“... local vicar must have been as entertaining as it was scandalous and shocking. Thirty years later, Peter Vavasour from Yorkshire was prosecuted by the High Commission for similarly provocative words about the Christian doctrine of life after death. ‘Tush tush,’ he declared. ‘That is but a tricke of the clergye, to cause the people to beleeve … to gett ...”

“... venture to think that [Fitzjames] had few equals in good downright sledgehammer controversy.’ Reading through this selection of his articles enforces the unsurprising conclusion that vigorous use of the tomahawk and the sledgehammer doesn’t make for the subtlest literary criticism. Fitzjames had, it’s true, an undeniable facility for hitting the nail ...”

“... and tells us a lot about why he interprets Mozart’s life in the way that he does. Solomon’s reading of Mozart’s music is governed by a single idea: the subversion of paradise by reality and death – et in arcadia ego. In his early output, Mozart explores the possibilities of the serenade, a genre whose ‘predominant character is ...”

“... evolution has specifically fortified against missile attack. Had Werther devoted his last hours to reading anatomy rather than Lessing’s Emilia Galotti, he would have known to shoot himself through the right eye, or up through his open mouth. Literature might have been poorer by an operatic gesture but a lot of young men would have been spared needless ...”

“... the perspective of an adult, and to assume that Gorey did too. Yet, as his occasional collaborator Peter Neumeyer remarked: ‘Of all the people I’ve known nobody has been less interested in children.’ He had no memory of Gorey ever even using the word ‘child’.What Gorey understood was not children, but the perspective of childhood and its lack of ...”

“... been a resistance, at least among psychoanalysts themselves, to thinking of their work as mind-reading or fortune-telling. Despite the fact that most ordinary conversation is exactly this, or perhaps because it is, psychoanalysts have wanted to describe what they do as different, as rational even: dealing with the irrational but not dealing in it (‘On ...”

“... small Latin and less Greek was the objection of a writer whose own mission centred on classical reading. We can come closest to the workings of his mind in tracing, in his translations, adaptations and allusions, his inner dialogues with Roman authors of the early empire, the principal shapers of his philosophy and of his perception of the political and ...”

“... na Mara (‘shieling of the sea’) in Kilpheder (from the Gaelic Cille-pheadair, or ‘church of Peter’). Ten square miles of machair stretch from the western dunes to the eastern rocky moors. This is a plain of shell-sand, where millions of cockles and whelks, razor-shells and buckies, ground into ivory fragments smaller than a baby’s fingernail, have ...”

“... of idolatry’) is a master of such sound effects. The young Brown played a recording of Eliot reading his poetry ‘so often and so loudly’ that his mother and sister ‘began to go about their housework chanting chunks of The Waste Land and Murder in the Cathedral’. The Waste Land’s ‘Magnus Martyr’ and Eliot’s most famous play must have had a ...”

“... housewife, instinctively knew this, as did Reagan the hokey cowboy). But it also derived from his reading of evolutionary theory. He believed that human nature inclined towards socialism. This was because tribal feelings of loyalty – trade with the in-group, kill outsiders – had served us well on the savannah. We naturally want to organise our economic ...”

“... Sontag magnetised the camera her entire career, a watchful muse and Medusa starer in portraits by Peter Hujar (whose photographs line the inside cover of Moser’s book like a wall of publicity stills), Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe, and, later, her partner Annie Leibovitz. Sontag’s post-cancer skunk-stripe hair made her instantly ...”

“... seine fishermen of Long Island whose way of life was being extinguished in the mid-1980s, just as Peter Matthiessen was at work on his account of it? ‘These doggedly independent men,’ he tells us, ‘do not speak of themselves as “working”, far less “taking a job”.’ He quotes one of the younger generation: ‘Fishin wasn’t a job, it was your ...”

“... postwar renaissance. Thomas Bernhard was the acknowledged leader of the dissident pack, with Peter Handke and the Forum Stadtpark group from Graz representing the next wave of an obligatory avant-garde. Jelinek was at the young end of this group, but gained instant recognition within it. It was her natural mode to épater les bourgeois, starting with her ...”

“... truth, it seems both to Murdoch’s husband, John Bayley (‘Puss’), and to her biographer, Peter Conradi, that it did so here. In their view Murdoch’s advancing illness, crumbling away language and reason, laid bare in her an essential impulse toward love. As words broke up, it was the vocabulary of love and delight that survived the longest. When ...”