“... brutality of a relation brought into the open, unmentionable in that epoch of Brushwood Boys and Peter Pans. Jessie Chambers wrote her own version of events in a novel she called The Rathe Primrose (Milton’s ‘rathe primrose that forsaken dies’) which Frieda found touching and ‘lovable’, while even Lawrence said ‘it wasn’t bad’. This ‘faded ...”

“... Leiris. It has pondered the theory of the sign, foregrounded photography and helped to install Peter Bürger’s 1974 essay ‘Theory of the Avant-Garde’ (translated into English in 1984) as a founding text of alternative cultural criticism. October’s influence on arts professionals has been powerful and lasting, though the editors in feistily refusing ...”

“... chauffeur and footman in fawn livery to pace up and down in formation after lunch. It is sad to read about the day seven chauffeurs mutinied over their treatment by a sneakily parsimonious cook. Two fussy maiden ladies who asked about the cost of stabling their Austin Seven were told ‘If you care to take it up to your bedroom there will be no charge for ...”

“... story of the Enlightenment’s steady diffusion outwards from its Parisian source. In the 1960s, Peter Gay gave them new power in his brilliant extended essay The Enlightenment: An Interpretation. Gay recognised the international dimensions of the Enlightenment, and included Scots, English, Germans and Italians as well as French in what he called the ...”

“... of consciousness, planetary extinction – have become urgent global concerns, a critic like Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker, presumably speaking for a politburo, can still assure his readers that Burroughs ‘wages literary war not on perceptible real-world targets but against suggestions that anyone is responsible for anything’ and that a writer ...”

“... Germany’s foremost living poet. Enzensberger is the most important postwar writer you have never read. He was born in 1929 in the Bavarian town of Kaufbeuren. His father was a post office bureaucrat with expertise in radio and telecommunications, aspects of a burgeoning modernity that would engage the interest of his eldest son. Expelled from the Hitler ...”

“... work carried out in other countries’. He had studied in Germany before the First World War, and read and spoke German; he had also visited England and met English economic historians; and he was the author of a major, synoptic analysis of Feudal Society, first published in 1939 and finally translated into English in 1961, as well as a study of the ‘royal ...”

“... mature to be ruled by a secular left. Opposed to one another though they are, all these versions read the Iranian protests as a conflict between Islamic hardliners and pro-Western liberal reformists. That is why they find it so difficult to locate Mousavi: is he a Western-backed reformer who wants to increase people’s freedom and introduce a market ...”

“... Old One. It is generous of Wade not to ridicule this. Like most romantic rituals, it is hard to read about without wincing: ‘The OO commands me to send a wave of his paw’ and so on. Mirrlees has been blamed for encouraging Harrison to destroy her papers. Wade doesn’t agonise too much over the reasons for this. It is easy to assume that, along with the ...”

“... pioneering work of Samuel Johnson, and rival the efforts of 19th-century European lexicographers. Peter Gilliver, in The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (2016), characterises the movement that led to the formalisation of the Philological Society’s proposals as ‘a groundswell of what might be called lexicographic nationalism’, and the OED has ...”

“... remarkable. The original text says, ‘Il y a beaucoup de hasard en tout ceci,’ and we get to read, in the different translations I will describe in a moment:There is a large element of chance in these matters. [Terence Kilmartin]Chance plays a large part in all of this. [James Grieve]There is a great deal of chance in all this. [Lydia Davis]There is a ...”

“... as alien. The literary case Heller-Roazen privileges above all others is Adelbert von Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl, the plebeian Faust who sold his shadow to the devil for magical gifts quickly squandered and so lost his ‘human belonging’, as Thomas Mann put it. Here the Latin adage nomen omen has an ironic twist, for Chamisso thought Schlemihl meant ...”

“... the treaty bound the sovereigns not only to one another but also to those they ruled. It could be read not only as a private agreement between monarchs but as a public commitment to constitutional and international reform. Nakhimovsky shows that networks of largely Protestant republicans and reformers engaged in elaborate interpretations of the Holy ...”

“... more polite and discussable aspects of Eliot as a person who had, for example, thought a bit and read a bit. Some writers tried, as Eliot himself never did, to work his critical observations up into a coherent theory; others, like Grover Smith, read what he had read, so far as this could ...”

“... let’s have us honey –‘It set the prosodic pattern,’ Berryman told the interviewer, Peter Stitt, who had been a student of his a few years earlier. The interview was conducted in a ward in St Mary’s Hospital in Minneapolis, where Berryman seemed to be comfortable. He spent quite a bit of time there during the last few years of his life. In ...”