“... to talk, from the same class background as myself. His clothes were of a different weave; his English was different. And this, along with the fact that he was from Pakistan, not to speak of an openness and charm he had, was one of the reasons for my being attracted to his company. There are many upper-middle-class people in South Asia (as there probably ...”

“... out, in the words of the King of Brobdingnag, as a pernicious race of little odious vermin. Even Richard Rorty, the self-styled postmodernist liberal, felt able to pronounce that cruelty was ‘the worst thing we do’. Torture has posed a problem for philosophers. Simple utilitarianism has notorious difficulties in explaining why torture or other such abuse ...”

“... and although his knowledge of Greek literature seems to have been mediated through Latin and English translations, he knew Plutarch well through Sir Thomas North’s version of the Parallel Lives, and is likely to have kept up with the publication of Chapman’s Homer. Successive chapters of Burrow’s book explore Shakespeare’s engagement with ...”

“... tells the story in The Man who Wrote the Perfect Novel, that the novelist stationed himself in the English department’s outer office, in sight of the faculty mailboxes, the morning after Howe’s review reached subscribers in Colorado. A few of his colleagues congratulated him, but most said nothing. Williams stayed there all day, Shields says, then went ...”

“... realised that things had gone wrong as soon as I arrived at my hotel. The receptionists spoke no English. Only when I showed them my passport did they seem to accept, with reluctance, that I had a booking. I was given a key and took my own bag upstairs. The room was a cramped, overfurnished space with thin brown walls. On the desk was an envelope of ...”

“... in the afternoon. This interest in good looks was hardly surprising. From the age of eight, the English upper middle class were incarcerated for 35 weeks in the year in boarding schools, and from there passed to the seminaries of Oxford and Cambridge. From the age of eight they were introduced to two mythologies – that of the Bible and that of Ancient ...”

“... of 17th-century ballads, which supplied Bishop Percy with material for his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. Pepys himself was remembered, if at all, as a naval administrator who’d had a compulsion for buying up printed paper. The library’s catalogue – it wasn’t a secret – listed six volumes of his diaries, but no one read them. The sentences ...”

“... in 1915 to Ottoline Morrell. The war had ravaged Lawrence. Before it began he had felt that English life was on the edge of a resurrection. The slaughter in France undermined his foundations. Lawrence was given, like Céline, to overstatement: ‘It would be nice if the Lord sent another flood and drowned the world,’ he wrote to Lady Ottoline. This is ...”

“... in classical literature, both men learned to be professional writers in that decisive period of English cultural history when economic conditions, combined with the enhanced prestige of the vernacular as an instrument of emergent nationalism, first made such a career possible. They also exercised their trade at a time when, as a consequence, the idea of ...”

“... made its initial move from exteriority to interiority doesn’t much concern Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman. Their book is an essay on the ‘historical construction and the political uses of trauma’ and a report on anthropological fieldwork aimed at ‘denaturalising’ it and ‘repoliticising victims’. Working in a Foucauldian tradition, they ...”

“... are here Missing in Action. Entirely absent, or mentioned only in passing, are Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, John Yoo, Elliott Abrams, Ahmed Chalabi, Ayad Allawi, Rick Santorum, Trent Lott, Tom DeLay, Richard Armitage, Katherine Harris, Ken Mehlman, Paul O’Neill, Rush Limbaugh. Barely appearing at all are John ...”

“... career as the avatar of the good and the not-so-good, still travelling in the wake of Little Richard. The history of rock ’n’ roll focuses on the white triumvirate – Presley, Buddy Holly and Jerry Lee Lewis, who have at different times heaped contumely on themselves – neglecting its roots in Jazz and the Blues, and a sibling relationship with ...”

“... has its quota of resident yogins, astrologers and cabalists. Guidebooks to these regions abound. Richard Cavendish in The Magical Arts makes an ambitious survey of the whole field – numerology, the Cabala, alchemy, astrology – and then, crossing the boundary between the dubiously permissible and the outright dangerous, goes on to ritual magic designed to ...”

“... Mighty prophets like Gerrard Winstanley (a bankrupt cloth merchant turned cattle herdsman), Sir Richard Bulkeley (an early 18th-century hunchback virtuoso), William Blake (‘I see so little of Mr Blake now,’ his wife once complained: ‘He is always in Paradise’), and James Pierrepont Greaves (damned by Carlyle as a ‘blockhead’ and an ...”

“... this, in turn, ‘launched her into a lifetime course of reading, beginning with Chaucer in Middle English, moving on to Erasmus, Donne, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and even Finnegans Wake’. In this case, the visit to the local library was repaid with interest: under the name of Catherine Cookson, McMullen went on to write more than ninety ...”