“... from Oscar Wilde, who was 15 years his senior and, for a brief but crucial period, a friend. Wilde may have said he put his genius into his life and merely his talent into his art: what is indisputable is that he was careful to keep them well apart. Nothing Wilde wrote is directly autobiographical except De Profundis. Gide, on the other hand, published his ...”

“... New political ideas and movements have never arisen from the mass media, although the media may have been important in spreading knowledge about these developments. At its best, the press has been able to influence opinion, but it has never enjoyed the power to determine the course of events, or the way people think. Nonetheless, one of the popular ...”

“... interesting about them. Mr Clark rather disproportionately brings Yeats in at this point. Yeats may have concerned himself with the sacred mysteries, but they were not where he saw and heard poetry. He saw and heard poetry in real life. Mr Clark concedes that Yeats developed towards a pregnant natural speech as Brennan did not, but he could have conceded ...”

“... one he needs to be felt as consciously holding back from. Likewise the Kentons’s provinciality may arouse cosmopolitan scorn. They are loved with, but not for, their limitations: and one imagines Howells wanting some comparable mild treatment for his Talberts. He had told Elizabeth Jordan, though, to convey to each author that ‘it is not expected that he ...”

“... succession there once again predominated the cares of actually existing immortality.’ One may well find this second section episodic, and something of an indulgence on Grass’s part, his own licence to comment on a variety of topical events, from television culture to the assassination of the Treuhand chief Rohwedder: repetitive as well, since we ...”

“... as a parody of, those which Achilles delivers in Book One, so that the discredit attaching to them may have less to do with their substance, or at least with any radical untenability, than with the character of the speaker and the subversive implications of allowing low persons to express such views. As Pope put it, Homer ‘rebuk’d the Seditious in the ...”

“... of landscape or history will catch the acquisitive eye of a passing visitor, that they themselves may find favour with the high chiefs of official art and – one day – win a medal and thus be exempt from the selection process for the rest of their painting life. Almost.Huysmans loathes Salon stalwarts like Léon Bonnat (‘never has a more belaboured, more ...”

“... to build skyscrapers in the 1950s, the work of visionaries such as Mies, Soviet-inspired though he may have been, was spurned as ‘imperialist’ in favour of towers that very closely resembled the ones in the background of Malevich’s Manhattan montage.These ironies of circulation, exchange and transformation have long been Cohen’s speciality. His books ...”

“... Salome to own the house, something that seems to undermine the sincerity of Rachel’s gesture. It may be partly theatrical.There are three Swart children, Anton, who is doing his military service; Astrid, nearly grown up and newly aware of her sexual allure; and 13-year-old Amor, who actually hears the promise being made and considers its fulfilment to be an ...”

“... Capri, but Mary arrived back in England the following year with a baby; abandoned by Wallis, she may have tried to patch things up with Meredith, but he was immovable, refusing to let her see their boy and never meeting her again. In October 1861 news came of her death: ‘This filled my mind with melancholy recollections which I rarely give way ...”

“... about justice in war. More broadly, it clarified the nature of moral constraints on the means that may be used even in pursuit of good ends, and the difference in moral responsibility for harms we intend and harms that are side effects of our actions. Equally important in this area was Foot’s 1967 essay ‘The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the ...”

“... saw, bin Laden attacked the homeland on 11 September 2001 – burying a few thousand of us. He may yet bury more. We, of course, are sending his kind to their graves in Afghanistan, Iraq and other corners of the Islamic patrimony. Osama’s is a two-theatre war: one on the battlefield, the other on the airwaves. For a guy on the run, he is not doing ...”

“... punishment had to bear a large part of the burden of deterrence. Radishes and on-the-spot killings may have been rare occurrences, but they were vivid and must have been hard for adulterers to ignore. How on earth can an adulterer keep it up, asks one character in a comedy, when he suddenly remembers Draco’s law? In some cases it looks as if the severity of ...”

“... pastures and dwelling places of the earth that they, remembering themselves to be Thy tenants, may not rack and stretch out the rents of their houses and lands, nor yet take unreasonable fines and incomes after the manner of covetous worldlings. A century later, the Levellers ratcheted up the rhetoric. Gerrard Winstanley declared that the earth ‘was made ...”

“... failed repeatedly on the battlefield and at times dealt clumsily with domestic opposition. On 4 May 1863 General Ambrose Burnside arrested Senator Clement Vallandigham of Ohio, at his house in Dayton. Vallandigham was the leading anti-war Democrat, but he didn’t consider himself a Confederate sympathiser. Burnside charged him with treason and arranged a ...”