“... to peer to check if this is an – or the – underworld. In her seething city-settings, paranoia may be the saving of you, and yet paranoia does have, too, a hideously masochistic alluring power. She is the poet of these death-bearing pheromones of fear. Found in the Street is her exact territory; she patrols these Greenwich Village streets as if from a ...”

“... to his Romantic forbears. The method of the book means that we have to attend to a great deal we may have heard before, such as brief expositions of Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Schiller: but it is true enough that the ideology, the pathology and the eschatology of the period under discussion have connections with those thinkers and many others roughly their ...”

“... it, waiting for Jelal and Rüya to return, and carries on the daily column in Jela’s name. Jelal may have good reasons for lying low. He is an essayist and storyteller rather than a political journalist – which is hardly surprising in a country where, then and now, authors can face imprisonment for exercising their right to political ...”

“... on South Island. The stamp bears two strikes of the Picton cancellation of 21 March 1904, which may have served to disguise its rare quality. Where it went then is a mystery. The package and its address have not survived but perhaps it had the distinction of travelling in one of the last coach and horse mail vans: in 1904 the first combustion engine ...”

“... performing their parts; but the possessed priests were genuinely beside themselves. Dog’s Dick may have started as a joke, but by the time he inhabited Father Tranquille he was as authentic as a demon can be. This is the story of Loudun. We already know it, for Aldous Huxley, writing against the background of McCarthyism, told it in The Devils of Loudun ...”

“... venerated antiquity and suggests a promise (however empty) of social benefit. Whatever Versailles may not have been, it certainly was a public building, a stage set for the sovereign to play the spectacle of power.’ But the same could be said of the sheikhs of Abu Dhabi and Dubai, who aim to draw businessmen and tourists by the jet-load to witness the ...”

“... life, and this seems correct. They provide the most sustained theme in his variegated career, and may be seen as a point of convergence for most of the tendencies of his mind. To consider the computers is to consider Babbage. Indeed his story falls under a triple rubric that belongs to computers from Babbage onwards: software, hardware, and applications. The ...”

“... that provide clues and proceed, with varying degrees of caution, to do some invention. The story may then become so complicated that even reasonably sober academic biographers have to alter the whole shape of the early career to accommodate their guesses. When the fiction is provided by someone whose business is precisely the writing of fiction the invention ...”

“... into the alliums, so many of them that the poor plants are bowed under their weight. 30 April-1 May. To Essential Music in Great Chapel Street to record The Uncommon Reader, which Gordon House, former head of drama at BBC Radio, has adapted and is producing. What other readers are like I’ve no idea, but I always feel I am a sound editor’s ...”

“... of his life’s work, inextricable from his larger concerns about history, culture and economics. Robert Casillo is therefore entirely correct to say that Pound’s writing raises ‘the problem of evil in literature’ in an especially clear way. ‘For it must be emphasised that Pound’s anti-semitism is quite different from Dostoyevsky’s and ...”

“... I feel like one who is on the sidelines, who has missed life itself.’ Mandela may be released soon. If so, a new biography, with his full co-operation, may be possible. Fatima Meer’s book is full of interest, but it is not worthy of the man: it stops and starts several times, is full of gaps and ...”

“... and not a review deliberately, and in this its title supports me, for, though West is discussing Robert Elsmere, The Case of Richard Meynell and Daphne, the ethos that Mrs Humphry Ward puts forward is the only thing that really interests her. Even when she comments that on every relevant page the face of the heroine Catherine Leyburn ‘works with emotion ...”

“... of the troubles with introductions, with images and masks, is that their implicit defensiveness may lead to a kind of stiffness, an inability to go beyond formality. Ashbery, who likes to think about identity in terms of flow, has always worried about our projections of ourselves hardening too much, as a passage from ‘The New Spirit’, one of his long ...”

“... of this book so that you could not read it. But now you can. Or at the very least, now you may. I telephoned the publicity department of HarperCollins to inquire who had tried, and how, to ‘stop the publication’ of Newt’s fruits. There was vagueness. I was referred downwards and sideways and eventually into the post-voicemail void. Now, there was ...”

“... 19th-century American palaeontologist Joseph Leidy. Then there are ‘men who knew too much’ (Robert Hooke, Alan Turing, G.K. Chesterton and, predictably, Alfred Hitchcock) and those whose knowledge ‘changed everything’ (Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell). Everything-knowers are admired, though with qualifications: the ...”