“... day, sweet when asleep.’ I have a fear that an unhealthy sweetness, a corn-syrupy sweetness, may be beginning to appear in Zagajewski’s work, perhaps brought on by so much time in the US, where most of his livelihood and reputation is won. I fear poetry as a sort of preserve, praise for the sake of praise, and lushness for the love of lushness. As with ...”

“... he joined the abortive crusade of Humbert, Dauphin of Vienne; it has been suggested that it may have been on this expedition, somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean, that he acquired the famous shroud. He had by this time already made a martial name for himself, and in 1346, after the French defeat at Crécy (a battle he was lucky to miss), he was taken ...”

“... but with a grasp of the obsession, with an evocation of how odd excitement is, how little it may be related to anything obviously exciting. Conversation with Mr Nicholas was enough to complicate excitement. ‘At the first hint of co-operation with his excitement his father lost interest.’ The excitement is authentic, and so is its draining. ‘He felt ...”

“... of the In-itself and the For-itself, which Sartre sees as part of the universal human condition, may ultimately be only a transfigured form of the intellectual dream which Flaubert expressed more naively: ‘to live like a bourgeois and think like a demi-god’ (i.e. like an intellectual). Thus, even in his life, divided between his desk and the literary ...”

“... from Western civilisation, and made his journey appear more of an exploration of his own self.) We may accept that the details of Phat Diem or Santiago were observable by anyone who happened to be there, but venture to think that only one writer would have selected them and not others present in the scene, and described them in those words in that particular ...”

“... in the light of the general argument advanced by Margot Heinemann in Puritanism and Theatre, it may be that we should also regard it as the quite natural response of a man less committed than Jonson to the royalist or ‘court’ party. Shakespeare had at least one patron (William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke) with substantial Puritan affiliations. He ...”

“... Reverse an Authoritarian Turn and Forge a Democracy for All’, is most surely a distortion. This may be America’s problem but in most parts of the world Levitsky and Ziblatt’s emphasis on ‘democratising our democracy’ and restoring majoritarian rule is the last thing liberal intellectuals want. Outside the US, liberals march under the banner of ...”

“... way of processing the world. He couldn’t be sure what ‘the experience of exultant plotting’ may have done to his mind – ‘at least not yet’. On the evidence of The World and All That It Holds, he still isn’t sure. Aleksandar Hemon isn’t the writer he once was, and his efforts to conceal it are fooling no ...”

“... to lean into globalisation while reneging on solidarity. From this act of radical self-harm we may not ...”

“... planet recedes in importance. A belief in the next world, and the possibility of judgment there, may encourage moral scruple without inspiring respect for the precariousness of our environment. The majority of believers in an afterlife have tended to regard the world, and everything in it, as an entitlement rather than a sacred ...”

“... to Eily and Stephen’s first snog: ‘I’ll just clear these plates. Goodbye dried mince. May the kissing go better for the Pinter beneath it. Will it? Orange peel on Valle-Inclán. What might have been a plaster on Howard Brenton.’In A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing (2013), McBride’s first novel, the narrator and her friend bunk off school and read ...”

“... of Indian philosophy and mysticism to corroborate the importance of national liberation.) ... it may be that I’ve lived through a period of such political and social disintegration that it is hard for me to conceive that some coherent explanation would emerge from such disparate and anarchistic opposing elements. The Armed Forces let Isabel Peron survive ...”

“... this so much the worse for the modern world, alarm bells should be ringing. ‘I like it here’ may be a valuable corrective to national self-denigration, but it is not a sufficient guide to the problems of national existence in the present or the future. Allison’s denunciation of media crisis-mongering is disturbingly reminiscent of Vice-President ...”

“... On the credit side, Woodforde is modest, affectionate, and wholly without snobbery, and while some may say that in a self-portrait he is bound to be so, it has to be remembered that in a diary stretching across nearly fifty years a great many unflattering lines will usually have crept in to balance any attempt by the writer to present his good side only. And ...”

“... subtler. They call for the same ingredients but in different proportions. The precise differences may take some years of puzzling work to appreciate; in each case there are many subtle variations according to the character of the actor. Thanks very much. That’s a great help. Nevertheless, Olivier manages, despite a dangerous amount of unchronological free ...”