“... to go to his funeral. It’s at Bradbourne, a tiny village the taxi-driver has never heard of, and he and his Asian colleagues have a map session before we eventually head off into the Derbyshire hills. The cab is old and draughty, it’s beginning to snow and as we drive through this landscape of lost villages and frostbitten fields it gets more and more ...”

“... And with the Greeks we began to try to do something about it. Their philosophical breakthrough, he suggests, was to position medicine as part of the problem of the nature of reality and of change. Health, according to Hippocrates, was equilibrium; ill health its opposite: understanding disease meant understanding the balance between man as a corporeal being ...”

“... were aged ten or under. The response to the second intifada has been even more violent, leading Ha’aretz to declare that ‘the IDF … is turning into a killing machine whose efficiency is awe-inspiring, yet shocking.’ The IDF fired one million bullets in the first days of the uprising. Since then, for every Israeli lost, Israel has killed 3.4 ...”

“... headline like ‘diana killed in crash,’ add ‘by MI5’ on the end, and share? Rusbridger says he saw the future on a tour round the US media in 1993, though the Guardian and the Observer, its Sunday sister, weren’t to launch their fully fledged internet offering until 1998. ‘After just four days,’ he writes of ...”

“... Robert​ Louis Stevenson was always ill, that’s what people said, and in the late summer of 1884 he decided he wouldn’t return to the South of France, where he’d spent the past year and a half in a house called La Solitude. His wife, Fanny, sought the advice of his London doctors, who recommended Davos in the Swiss mountains as being cholera-free, but Stevenson fancied southern England ...”

“... tell of a young burgher’s adventures among theatre folk, ruined castles, secret societies, as he seeks to find himself inside himself – Bildung means ‘formation, education or culture’, as Rose says in the Marxist Modernism lectures, ‘and experience in the sense of Bildung is a process which starts from the observation and partial understanding of ...”

“... want to ask you about Robert Lowell: as an influence on your work, that is, and only then as what he later became – a ‘Life’, the subject of your first full-length biography. You did and do admire him greatly as a poet, yet in his poetic practice didn’t he trample all over the distinctions, the reticences and ...”