“... on by Hamlet in staging the play that catches the conscience of King Claudius. George Buchanan, James I’s tutor, saw the depiction of tyranny in his own tragedies as an instrument of James’s education. The blunt couplets of The Mirror for Magistrates supplied vivid warnings of the destruction that awaits kings and ...”

“... of worthless textual commodities. Ignorant scribblers and penniless dunces translate Virgil out of prior translations, thrash tedious verses out of dictionaries of rhyme, and manufacture and prolong pointless controversies simply to sell more print. But Fielding’s mockery ignores the relentless and increasingly imaginative obscenity that had been at the core ...”

“... the alternative of making a non-rational choice? Dr Küng’s answer to this question rests on a prior thesis about what he takes to be an even more fundamental universal human choice, the choice between nihilism and what he calls ‘fundamental trust’. He approaches his characterisation of this latter choice by drawing upon the views of certain modern ...”

“... of fiction that are outstandingly successful from a commercial point of view – Ken Follett and James Herbert, perhaps – or the most saccharine romance. Instead, it awards its prize to ‘the best novel in the opinion of the judges, published each year’. ‘Best’ is interpreted as ‘most distinguished literary performance’. The ulterior ...”

“... what officials described as an ‘emotional and sexual relationship’, and in the weeks prior to his trespass Chail had confided in the bot: ‘I believe my purpose is to assassinate the queen of the royal family.’ To which Sarai replied: ‘That’s very wise.’ ‘Do you think I’ll be able to do it?’ Chail asked. ‘Yes,’ the bot ...”

“... two decades on topics such as Dryden’s triplets, Shakespeare and anagrams, T.S. Eliot, Henry James, Byron, Norman Mailer, Ion Bugan, Samuel Beckett, Geoffrey Hill, and what Ricks argues is the non-distinction between poetry and prose. ‘Any claim to coherence has to be a mild one,’ Ricks says of the volume, since the two subjects, heroism and the ...”

“... of effort and attention, and the place from which ... emanate the fiats of the will’, in William James’s words. This seems very plausible. Suppose the seven elements capture the conceptual core of the ordinary human sense of the self. The question then arises whether they are all essential to anything counting as a genuine sense of the self. I will ...”

“... of like-minded right-wingers had taken for their exclusive use. Yarosh had been chosen as leader; prior to that he’d headed an organisation called Stepan Bandera Trident, the trident being Ukraine’s national symbol. ‘People say we’re terrorists, extremists,’ he said. ‘In fact we are nationalist revolutionaries. There’s nothing extremist in ...”

“... the time (or knowledge) to fill; slips of paper with notes like ‘pray remember to looke upon Mr James Harrington’s life: upon my alterations there’; marginal references to ‘quaere iterum’ (‘inquire again’); and references to a crowd of other texts with which Aubrey’s writings are always chattering. Often, in fact, what he is doing is not ...”

“... counsel to the government when at the bar) – had held on cogently reasoned grounds that the prior authority of an Act of Parliament was required. Nevertheless the Supreme Court sat in full, all 11 members, to hear what even the sober Constitution Unit was calling the case of the century. Well, the appeal failed, and by a decisive margin of eight votes ...”

“... Gerty, was at the end of Leahy Road in Sandymount. It is where, reputedly, on 16 June 1904, James Joyce took Nora Barnacle on their first date, when she slid her hand down inside his trousers to move his shirt ‘softly aside’. With hindsight, Joyce saw something in that moment (eyes closed, eyes open): a kind of crux in his life, the fact that his ...”

“... back in Tonight, a book as explicit as late Yeats or late Heaney in its return to the poet’s prior work. There are also recurring character types: during the late 1960s, guerrilla warriors; during the 1970s, female explorers, daring their way two by two through the harsh unknown. Then and now, there are also would-be male allies ultimately left ...”

“... of them. I even have to will myself to watch modern film or TV adaptations of Dickens, Trollope or James, and when it comes to Jane Austen adaptations, I refuse. This is not because I’m an anti-television snob. I watch TV and box sets of popular drama series in greedy excess. Westerns, thrillers, political, medical, legal and science fiction are welcome even ...”

“... religion is all about, all the diverse ways in which it continues to move millions. When William James gave his lectures on the varieties of religious experience, he wasn’t speaking of boxes full of anthropological data, but of lived experience. Of course it is important to test the hypothesis that prayer reduces stress, or that old people are ‘more ...”

“... it. But practically (and this is his first-rate triumph) we don’t think much about it. Henry James is not the first writer to have been impressed yet baffled by Pierre Loti. Anatole France, who called him the ‘sublime illiterate’, believed that, of all their contemporaries, he was ‘the most sure to last’. To his peers Loti was a distinct ...”