“... what it was like to travel around Italy and the Mediterranean in the first century BC, study and reading, the frequent resort to Greek. In among this trove is priceless evidence for the ancient history of emotions: Cicero’s unyielding grief over the death of his beloved daughter Tullia has corrected many easy assumptions about the nature of family ties in ...”

“... picking up an extra charge and weight from the circumstances in which they are read. I was reading Chez Krull not many months after the Brexit vote and what appeared to be its immediate social repercussions: the wall-daubings, the increase in racial abuse, the throwing of shit at ‘foreign’ women, the arson of a halal butcher, the licensed aggro of ...”

“... The relentlessly reader-friendly translation by Robert Fitzgerald departs from the usual reading to say the Carians were led by their chief ‘in their own tongue’. Robert Fagles, whose version aims at an idiomatic directness lacking in Lattimore, without the sacrifice of poetic force which is an almost inevitable feature of the literal Loeb ...”

“... and forfeiture. But Maus does not succumb to the temptation of eliding text with context and reading literature as law. She is refreshingly aware that the plays attracted audiences by staging exceptional situations. ‘Actual princesses,’ as she puts it, ‘do not flee to the greenwood in male disguise, there to court and marry indigent younger ...”

“... voice’ and when she admires something he has done he ‘writhes and looks away’. And yet, when Peter Carey wins the Booker for Oscar and Lucinda, H realises ‘how differently we think about our work in the world: I see that he is able to imagine his work in that league, while to me it is not even thinkable – it never crosses my mind.’If the ...”

“... into the history of economic thought, it was Marx who made it famous. As the literary historian Peter Stallybrass has pointed out, there were good materialist reasons for this. Living in penurious exile in London during the 1850s and 1860s, Marx often had to hock his greatcoat for cash when his credit with the greengrocer ran out. In February 1852 he wrote ...”

“... those, Romford and Upminster, are idiosyncratic. Those conspicuous beneficiaries of Thatcherism, Reading and Swindon, swung further to Labour – in Reading West the swing was over 7 per cent – while both the seats in Luton, home of the original ‘affluent worker’, which were gained by Labour last time and where the ...”

“... and said that without factor concentrates, quality of life would be ‘much poorer’ for many. Dr Peter Jones, director of Newcastle’s haemophilia centre, complained to the Press Council that the Mail on Sunday’s piece was ‘sensational and highly exaggerated’, and had led to haemophilia centres being ‘inundated with calls from worried ...”

“... way to Buckingham Palace, she decided to write Speaking for Myself. I can’t help feeling, after reading 400-odd pages of her memoir, that I still haven’t heard her real voice. A pity, since she seems not to have had a ghost, unlike John Prescott, who was ventriloquised by Hunter Davies; Michael Levy credits a journalist friend, Ned Temko, for his ...”

“... yer:/Hallelujah, Hallelujah!/We will gather up the fragments that remain.’ In Housman Country, Peter Parker does it by writing the life and times not of the man but of his most famous book: the growing pains of A Shropshire Lad, the vicissitudes of its reception, its cultural ‘aftermaths’. The word comes from agriculture, as Parker points out (new ...”

“... infinity. Well, they would, wouldn’t they? The central ideas are laughable and garnished with reading which, in other Bellow novels, might generate strenuous discussion, but here amounts to little more than perfunctory citations from a Russian literature binge. Kenneth Trachtenberg, the narrator, teaches Russian literature – hence the garland of dusty ...”

“... the giant panda of Sichuan Province in China. Schaller’s principles and practices inspired Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard. He is a big-game biologist, a student of spectacular individuals in nature rather than a toiler at the overlooked and the unindividuated: ‘An animal must provide an emotional experience if I am to involve myself in its ...”

“... rejected by our more powerful pundits of musical taste’ – Hans Keller, William Glock and Peter Heyworth. For someone like Keller, the gatekeeper of the debate about new music in the 1960s and 1970s, Cardew was a godsend: Keller might not agree with what he wrote, but he enjoyed orchestrating the subsequent controversy. Cardew became known not just as ...”

“... travelling in Italy with her parents; he was the family’s doctor in Rome. They had two children, Peter and Malcolm, and remained technically married until his death in 1949, though they spent very little time together and he saw almost nothing of his sons as they were growing up. ‘There seems to have been no question of passionate love on Axel’s ...”

“... there earlier this year while waging ‘a defensive war’. It was a mark of Peter Hain’s extreme unpopularity in the Labour Party – he came fifth for the deputy leadership in an unimpressive field of six – that he had to find someone across the Atlantic to defend him over his undeclared donations, as Evans did last year. More ...”