“... enduring achievement of the long-dead ‘irrationalist’. His or her suggestions about what to do next will look merely quaint, but the criticisms of his or her predecessors will seem obvious. For example, everybody has doubts about the superman and the Oedipus complex, but nobody wants to revive the moral psychology which Nietzsche and Freud found in ...”

“... Winning is very important to Christopher Hitchens. Dr Johnson was said to ‘talk for victory’, and by all accounts it seems the same might be said of Hitchens. He certainly writes for victory. His preferred genre is the polemic; his favoured tone mixes forensic argument with high-octane contempt. And no one can accuse him of only picking on boys his own size: he is happy to take the ring against tubby, bespectacled former diplomats and little, shrivelled old ladies as well as (special contempt here) relatively fit joggers ...”

“... that the official would understand he was “Male-1”. Page told the official that he “didn’t do anything” [redacted].’ The last part of that final sentence is redacted because it concerns something still under a grand jury investigation. Who knows what happened next? The Hitchcock version might have been interesting. As it was, in January 2016 Page ...”

“... gave me much to puzzle over. Of Kinsella’s work, he wrote: ‘The poems can be rapid, but they do not flow. Most of them give the impression of being shaped under great pressure.’ But what really made me sit up straight was his remark about Geoffrey Hill’s ‘Annunciations’, the last poem in the book: ‘I understand “Annunciations” only in the ...”

“... room, sideways, without dismantling from each other’s shoulders.’ The image isn’t really to do with the memory of domestic interiors either. ‘That night,’ Ondaatje writes, I will have not so much a dream as an image that repeats itself. I see my own straining body which stands shaped like a star and realise gradually that I am part of a human ...”

“... Corbyn. Theresa May’s surprise announcement of a snap election – surprising only because she’d spent the last nine months telling us it wasn’t going to happen – immediately wiped North Korea from the headlines, and returned the spotlight to another, more drawn-out existential crisis: the one currently being endured by the Labour Party.What makes ...”

“... of the day concerned the 6 January rioters. I had last seen them when they were released from a DC jail after being pardoned by Trump on the day he took office. Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers, an anti-government militia, hung out on the lawn by the detention facility to welcome the prisoners as they streamed out. According to the prosecutor at ...”

“... attribution to Charlotte’s Belgian teacher, Constantin Héger, is laughable: it’s signed ‘Paul Hegér’ (Paul Emmanuel, a character with strong affinities to Héger, is the love-interest in Villette). The date given is 1850; Charlotte left Brussels in 1844. The accent is in the wrong place: Hegér not Héger. It ...”

“... the commentary. Deprived of one faculty they become less adept with the others, and when they talk do so in loud unregulated voices. Wayward and dilatory in their movements they are seemingly without purpose, though of course they are the purposeful ones. What to us are featureless alcoves of scrofulous masonry (and with no evidence of gold) presumably echoed ...”

“... me of so much time and patience. I was proud of my new skill, which I showed off to anyone who’d listen: my grandmother, an indulgent aunt, an illiterate woman called Mrs Atherton who was my mother’s ‘daily’, and, most unwisely, to my few contemporaries in the village, who beat me up for my intolerable conceit. But the capacity to read brought with ...”

“... in the avant-garde Paris literary journal Volontés, which also published Raymond Queneau, Henry Miller, Octavio Paz and Pablo Neruda.Return to My Native Land is often situated in the French literary tradition, and discussed in relation to Césaire’s major stylistic influences – Lautréamont, Claudel, Rimbaud, Apollinaire. But the poem is also part of a ...”

“... was calling for a united socialist states of Europe on the eve of publishing it. In any case, you do not disown your belief in socialism just because Stalin’s executioners claim to believe in it too, any more than you find Morocco unpleasant just because Michael Portillo drops in on the place occasionally. In Orwell’s view, it was the Stalinist Left that ...”

“... hand, said, ‘You must be very tired,’ and left. Alan’s languid phone calls were often to do with professional humiliation. In the 1999 production of Antony and Cleopatra at Stratford the curtain rose with Antony on his knees pleasuring the Egyptian queen of Frances de la Tour. Even the jaded eyebrows of Stratford ...”

“... goatee modelled on George Arliss’s Disraeli and had to be persuaded by his director, Jonathan Miller, to evolve in the succeeding weeks a characterisation based on his own face. No one seems to have told Holden that dress rehearsals normally complete, not commence, the rehearsal process. He will surprise many who worked with Tyrone Guthrie by describing ...”

“... to have made a permanent mark. It was founded and edited by Eugene Jolas (initially with Elliot Paul), and Jolas, too, was at the heart of art movements about which at the time the outside world knew little – Surrealism, Dadaism and Joyce among them. Few small mags have done as much to ‘make art free’. As well as Stein’s ‘Elucidation’, the first ...”