“... and, fleetingly, in Ernest Jones’s biography, where he appears as the ‘cretinous dwarf’ who may have saved Freud’s life after an operation. Little Goethe, intellectual giant and homunculus, world-beater and world-renouncer, author of ‘my famous paper Against Behaviourism’, will live for ever: but unlike the Sybil he’s condemned to permanent ...”

“... of other poets? An analysis of the verbal ‘ups’ and ‘downs’, such as Ricks gives us here, may have its interest, but if we imagine that we are thereby saying anything about the poetry, or think such things a clue to the affinity between poets, we are surely mistaken. One of the most interesting essays in this book is that on Beddoes, billed as ...”

“... like the landscape he traversed, but he rises easily to comparisons with writers whom he may never have read. He does not know everything – though where did he learn his Latin? – but he listens with an intellectual’s sensitivity to historical nuance, and this is rare in America, even in academic circles. Surely not more than one Missourian in a ...”

“... bit. A pity, perhaps, that it had to be the Express: but then an awful lot of miners read it. It may be that much confusion would be avoided in British political discourse if we had a popular analogue of the French word travaillisme. Gormley’s ‘socialism’, he says, was always ‘a gut belief’; it had nothing to do with books, or intellectual ...”

“... for the Black Panthers. ‘Radical Chic’ has passed so far into the Anglo-American argot that it may be futile, 13 years later, to attempt to expose it. For one thing, it was so nearly right. Everybody knew somebody who answered or fitted the description. For another, the older and cleverer phrase – limousine liberal – had gone out with Adlai Stevenson ...”

“... Its tragic aspects (it is probable that Mozart is dramatising his wife’s suffering, though she may have exaggerated it to him) have the quality of a recitativo accompagnato. Only after the prelude, with its double address both to the friend and to the lodge brother, does the curtain rise on the troubled scene. It begins with the exclamation ...”

“... at night with a spray can. White is direct, frank and unsensational about his homosexuality, which may well be a key to understanding his work and his life. He grew up in a wealthy family, comfortable, accustomed to servants (English and Scots) to whom he felt attached, undisturbed (he says), but nevertheless driven in on himself, by the early recognition of ...”

“... but also because everything Disraeli said or did is subject to qualification by something else he may have done or said at some other time. Consider, for instance, the idea of Disraeli as a kind of Zionist-before-Zionism. Surely, one thinks, his novel Alroy, which is about a medieval Jewish leader who wishes to redeem the Jews from captivity and bring them ...”

“... made war on darkness in repeated incarnations; as he raises himself out of the material world, so may others who retain the spark of the divine being. But Bloom’s myth is not likely to apply primarily to being, to living, or to the religious state of knowing: his concern has always been with writing. Perscors’s discovery of his identity reminds us of an ...”

“... anorexia. There was, however, a large ‘middling’ group who raised most of their own food and may have been spared from the ill-effects of excess and deficiency. The diets of the rich and the poor, already far apart, diverged still further during the 16th century, and in 1597, the year Henry IV was written, thousands died of starvation or of diseases ...”

“... without the Times! Can the temple of the Establishment survive the crumbling of its pillar? There may have been a tendency, as Eric Jacobs suggests in his chronicle of the 11-month shut-down which brought about the present disaster, for the boardroom protagonists to regard the affair in the light of one of Mr William Rees-Mogg’s editorials. However, we ...”

“... which we require if we are to believe on similarly rational grounds that God does not exist may not differ from each other in significant ways. Generally, when questions of existence are in doubt, the onus of justification lies with those who maintain that something of such and such a kind does exist, and generally therefore it is reasonable to continue ...”

“... the precondition for the claims science makes to its high status. Wittingly or unwittingly, Calder may have done his best to destroy the slim chance Hoyle and his collaborators have of being treated seriously by even mentioning him. Calder himself reports the ‘heavy-handed scorn and vilification’ with which his own (correct) suggestion about the incidence ...”

“... it is the consequence of a belief – the belief that as well as the mind there is the soul, which may know and feel things the mind cannot grasp, except perhaps by fragmentary translations into words which are not the words we use every day. It is not a belief that is often exemplified in modern fiction. In saying this, we run into the danger of making ...”

“... and increasing compassion for characters caught up in decay and confusion, so that, though they may be the puppets of history, they are not merely puppets.’ Finally, there is the diary Farrell kept during early 1971, when he was travelling in India to gather material for The Siege of Krishnapur. Not meant for publication, this is a noticeably less stylish ...”