“... he can do nothing but brood over the details of the interrogation, tortured by the thought that he may have betrayed others by giving away too much or hurt himself by giving away too little. In a concentration camp one would, perhaps, have had to wheel stones until one’s hands bled and one’s feet froze in one’s boots; one would have been packed in ...”

“... wrote, ‘but starts rather from an inner fact of his individual consciousness.’ These two views may not be contradictory for most poets, but they are problematic in the case of MacDiarmid because he had been built from the outside in. In 1939, MacDiarmid wrote to an aspiring writer who had sent him some poems: so far from producing poetry you seem to me to ...”

“... serious about it, with the one o’clock news. Dilworth contacted me for the first time in May. He described an artwork he wanted to undertake, a ritual for the night before Midsummer’s eve. He was going to climb a mountain on the neighbouring Isle of Lewis and trap a phial of air. This was interesting, as news of the what-are-you-up-to-these-days ...”

“... for all practical purposes invincible. It’s hard not to feel that the high drama of Manhattan may be misdirecting the world’s priorities. A few years from now, aircraft will be among the safest places in the world to be. You only have to build them so that the cockpit and the cabin have two separate entrances, each from outside the aircraft. Then you ...”

“... ruin as an expression of violence and blind hatred is not Woodward’s subject, however hard it may be to avoid the connection. His interest lies in the questions raised by empty spaces. ‘When we contemplate ruins,’ he writes, ‘we contemplate our own future.’ Filippo Brunelleschi was doing just that when, a Florentine, he arrived in Rome in the ...”

“... the weak, and Moore’s characters use it in precisely that defeated spirit. So though the reader may cringe when yet another of Moore’s long-suffering women cries, ‘Did God have her mixed up with someone else? Get a Job, she shouted silently to God. Get a real Job. I have never been your true and faithful servant,’ the heavy-handedness of the punning ...”

“... look like resentment,’ adding: ‘I will be ingenuous enough to confess that something of this may be true.’ But it was also the first glimmering of a preference which in the next century would become a battle of the styles between the Gothic and the Classical. Already in the late 1740s a Gothic tinge was creeping over England, promoting sensibility ...”

“... was ‘Fountains’, but there isn’t a poem called that. Schmidt means ‘Fountain’. This may be just a typo, but it’s a revealing one. If you read a lot of Jennings’s work, the poems blur into one another; there is too much repetition, too much rewriting of the same poem, too many neat little verse essays. There is a lack of rhythmical ...”

“... the turn to capitalism after the war and his daughter thinks that an offer of marriage made to her may have been withdrawn because of her father’s art, though she tries not to let her suspicion show. When another round of marriage negotiations begins, Ono is aware that this time his prospective son-in-law has hired private detectives to investigate his past ...”

“... claims to be the guilty one. The detective story is as much of a structure as a requiem, and we may see that patterns and structures are themselves themes in her poetry. It is at once a religious and a scientific fascination, not with the structures and patterns that explain or console, but with those that mystify and make ...”

“... without himself being the originator of any of the major ideas on which he actually worked. This may be the reason why his great contribution to the war effort has not been properly appreciated, but those of us who really knew what he did have an unbounded admiration for his contribution to our winning the war. After the war, Bernal had a hard time getting ...”

“... This is true. Few Westerners take account of Muslim resentment about the Crusades. In part this may be because only a small handful feel bitter about the Muslim conquest of Syria in the seventh century, of Spain in the eighth century and of the Balkans during the 15th and 16th centuries. History moves on. However, as Hillenbrand notes, it ‘is a strange ...”

“... between commerce and art. And yet Tati himself never quite emerges from these pages. Readers may feel that they get closer to him in the book-length interview conducted by Penelope Gilliatt in the Seventies (now long out of print). But even there he remains elusive, a purveyor of rehearsed anecdotes – many of them now exhumed by Bellos, and expertly ...”

“... of God. If the idea of God is a god – to recognise our friends is a god, said Euripides – we may call it the Good, Plato’s Form above all Forms. To see the Good is to love it, and to love it is to be ruled by it, and to be ruled by it is to be within it since it enfolds all partial goods, including oneself. (In the real world nobody is entirely ...”

“... of ventriloquism – or automatic writing – whenever his grandson puts pencil to paper. Couto may owe a debt to Latin America, but a greater influence is an African view of the world in which the boundaries between the living and the dead, the natural and the supernatural, are not so much blurred as irrelevant. Anyone who has grown up in Africa will be ...”