“... and has never really lost it. It has only just dawned on me that it might happen to me: indeed, may have happened already. I now go to the gym three times a week. I eat salad for lunch. People tell me how well I look. I suppose that means I must have been fat until recently and just didn’t realise it. Which makes me wonder: at what point are you thin and ...”

“... urbane: Do not take umbrage at my mother’s words for she’s craz– for she presents, as you may observe for yourself, some slight mental derangement . . . She is forever uncovering similarities between people she sees on television and Putain’s gang, as she calls it, a gang of swine who under different guises created all kinds of havoc. She believes ...”

“... earlier, seemingly definitive versions of these stories. A further problem is that reader fatigue may set in if a life is made to continue: writers need to know when to bring the curtain down. Many of us rebel when Tolstoy tries giving his subjects an afterlife. Natasha, plump and happy among nappies and nursery concerns, seems a sad falling off from the ...”

“... to say about interwar economic change and the role such hard-to-measure factors as love and duty may have played in driving it. Young women emerge in this history as a critically important force for economic transformation, and Todd comes up with an unexpected explanation for their canny and self-interested behaviour. When we imagine a typical interwar ...”

“... called Chaffers coached her in the law. What Brian Thompson does not tell us is that Georgina may well have done as much as Chaffers to pave the way for the 1896 Act against vexatious litigants, which restricted the immemorial right of everyone to sue anybody else at the surfacing of a grudge. Thompson gives the first name of Chaffers as William, but this ...”

“... and much to Custine’s amusement, eloped with the Spanish Infanta. Custine’s Polish connections may have played a large part in his decision to travel to Russia, but the journey was at least in some sense undertaken to counter the ideas in Tocqueville’s La Démocratie en Amérique. ‘There are on earth today two great peoples ... they are the Russians ...”

“... David story – his relationship with God. It is the more puzzling because, for all we know, David may be an entirely fictional character, in which case it is not so much his relationship with God as the narrator’s which is our concern. Put simply, did this narrator believe in Yahweh; or, a little less simply, what kind of god did he think Yahweh was? This ...”

“... is considerably less than 1000 lines), he recalls Robert Graves’s suggestion that the long poem may be ‘nothing more than a poet’s attempt at greatness, at becoming “major” ’. While, on the one hand, Armitage asserts that ‘today, it is still the short poem that stays in the mind as language, whereas longer poems tend to be remembered for their ...”

“... the poet Rumi, is not very Persian. In a way not unlike Waley and Pound, he forgoes accuracy (he may not have been capable of it in any case), in favour of maintaining the reader’s sense that something has been lost. Rumi is euphoric in his glimpses of the beloved, and he sees him everywhere: ‘When I seek peace, he is/the kindly intercessor,/and when I ...”

“... and corruption. Marge, Dickie’s girlfriend, sums him up very effectively: ‘All right, he may not be queer. He’s just a nothing, which is worse. He isn’t normal enough to have any kind of sex life.’ One is tempted to claim that, rather than being a closet gay, Ripley is in fact a male lesbian. Tom Ripley was not a mask for Highsmith so much as ...”

“... play of characters at all. The amorphousness of his prose, its dependence on cumulative effect, may derive from the fact that his characters lack the willpower to shape their lives and thus the novel that describes them. Yet they seem strong enough to deserve a more generous treatment. Austerlitz survives an early trauma and a narrow upbringing to establish ...”

“... of aggression’, to impose sanctions, and to ‘take such action by air, sea or land forces as may be necessary’. This was a constitutional moment in international affairs: an anarchic world of self-help and temporary alliances was transformed into a nascent system of governance. The drafters of the Charter were hardly naive. Recognising that the UN ...”

“... moments of adversity or shock or recognition were parlayed into a droll serial martyrdom. (He may be poetry’s Peter Pan, but he is also its St Sebastian.) The necessarily rather anonymous ‘I’ of the early poems becomes a fully developed character, very close to the poet, a habitual fall-guy for the poems, like the further alter ego, ‘Sonny ...”

“... go ooh-aah, and oh no oh no oh no along with the action. The manuscript of Tales of the Marvellous may date from the 14th century, which would make it older than what is thought to be the earliest existing manuscript of the Thousand and One Nights. It’s missing its title page, and the table of contents shows that only 18 stories out of the original 42 have ...”

“... ensuring that they remained ever present, with devastating consequences for the future. It may seem far-fetched to argue that so much lasting damage was done by the strategy adopted by a dictatorship which ended so long ago. But it isn’t if we bear in mind two factors. First, that while Francoism managed to absorb huge economic and social ...”