“... from the guslari with pencil and paper. (At times Parry bears a more than passing resemblance to Michael Redgrave’s character at the beginning of The Lady Vanishes, ‘putting on record for the benefit of mankind one of the last folk dances of Central Europe’.) Parry returned to Harvard in September with less material than he would have liked, but a ...”

“... wish for courage. The struggle was always a solitary one: the fate of one man against nature, one hunter against savage forces, with no God to help him. Hemingway founded a style in the space left for heroism. Indeed, that is the way his style works: by never actually mentioning the main anxiety. Writing to his siblings from his desk at the Kansas City Star ...”

“... after Salter had seen a script realised in film, the skiing drama Downhill Racer, directed by Michael Ritchie and starring Robert Redford. Solo Faces is the story of a rock-climbing drifter and his friend and rival and their pursuit of glory through heroic feats on the mountain. In the earlier A Sport and a Pastime, the quarry, the struggled for peak, is ...”

“... his own letters. His sleuthing in libraries and monasteries was recognised by the great manuscript hunter of the following century, Poggio Bracciolini. Petrarch was the pioneer, Poggio said: he ‘opened the path’, and ‘with his labour, industry and watchful attention, called back to life those works almost brought to destruction’. But even as they ...”

“... on, but then skirts. The historical novel – if we except its one great precursor, Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas – is a product of romantic nationalism. This is as true of Tolstoy as it is of Scott, Cooper, Manzoni, Galdós, Jókai, Sienkiewicz or so many others. The original matrix of this nationalism was the European reaction against Napoleonic ...”

“... knowing that if I enter its winding ways I shall never come out. And I confine myself to saying of Michael Fried’s thirteen-line poem ‘Delacroix’ – Delacroix is the poem’s speaker, asking forgiveness of the Arab hunter he has conjured into life and death – that it is everything an anti-ekphrasis should be.*The ...”

“... because they assumed he was a semi-Fascist ultra like themselves. But, as the Cambridge historian Michael Postan put it, ‘They are such fools: they thought they were electing a Tory and never realised that they were electing a Whig.’ Mrs Thatcher imagined that the scholar who had written The Last Days of Hitler would share her hostility to a reunified ...”

“... in the life of the Penan. They were the human equivalent of an endangered species: the last hunter-gatherers in Asia. Manser moved between different Penan bands, extended families of a few dozen people who lived on platforms of branches and leaves which they abandoned every few months when the boar and wild sago were exhausted. As well as hunting, he ...”

“... having only a fraction of an $89 tax refund left to spend. On the beach he met a blonde, Neilia Hunter, who picked up the tab for hamburgers for two and got him into a club for free because a friend of hers was dating the owner. (‘I fell ass over tin cup in love – at first sight. And she was so easy to talk to.’) By the end of the weekend they had ...”

“... brother, Fredo, who is weak and indecisive, and is eventually murdered by his younger brother, Michael, after he assumes control of the family business. Donald was most like the hot-headed Santino ‘Sonny’ Corleone, whose impulsiveness results in his assassination by rival gang members at a tollbooth. Donald has raced through many tollbooths, but has ...”

“... and barely 25 million South Koreans, which adds up to a lot more people. As Dean Spears and Michael Geruso write in After the Spike, ‘in the short run of one generation or less, the global population is a very big ship, slow to turn.’ Much of what will happen is already determined, so that even dramatically declining birth rates in some places will ...”

“... unlike Bourdieu he did not lead marches. Some politicians became friends (he got the bus with Michael Foot; Gordon Brown was a dinner guest) and in the late 1970s and 1980s he would catalyse a fierce and consequential debate about the future of the Labour Party through interventions in Marxism Today (interventions that were blamed for – and that ...”

“... productions, and his beautiful settings of Ariel’s songs in The Tempest survive. The historian Michael Wood has ingeniously argued that the lyrics of ‘Woods, Rocks & Mountains’ are suggested by the wilderness setting of the Cardenio story and have some parallels with phrases in Shelton’s Quixote. He thinks the song was performed at the point in ...”

“... is in the nature of Macbeth to be swift and utterly single-minded,’ the critic Michael Long writes. As though there must be no time for hesitation or revision or doubt. As though there is a danger that momentum might be lost. A change of heart – or even the possibility of giving up on the usurpation of Duncan – must not, cannot, be ...”

“... sea and back to us as more carbohydrate. The carbon loop used to be closed, and if we had stuck to hunter-gathering and muscle-powered farming, it might have stayed so for ever. Then we found fossil fuels. Marco Polo reported that the Chinese kept warm by burning black stones, but our present energy gluttony has its origins in Abraham Darby’s successful use ...”