“... Past and Future. And Yale has inaugurated a new series, ‘Why X Matters’, with Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s Why Arendt Matters. Arendt would undoubtedly have been pleased by all this. She didn’t like attention, but she did love birthdays. Birth meant the arrival of a new being who would, or could, say and do things no one had said or done before. The ...”

“... cabinet secret. There is no tomorrow. But Mme de T–– had not expected to tangle with the young chevalier and now her real lover (stalking the shadows of the story) has been cuckolded. Something has changed, and not even Mme de T–– can claim to control the workings of circumstance. It is a libertine truth that you cannot rehearse a ...”

“... makes the scene even more touching. 6 February. I am reading a history of the Yorkshire Dales by Robert White, one of a series, Landscape through Time, published by English Heritage. During the enclosures of the 18th and 19th centuries, most of the land enclosed was added to existing farms, but in 1809 John Hulton used the land allotted to him from the ...”

“... I knelt and started to pray and prayed for everybody I thought of, Brett and Mike and Bill and Robert Cohn and myself, and all the bullfighters, separately for the ones I liked, and lumping all the rest, then I prayed for myself again, and while I was praying for myself I found I was getting sleepy, so I prayed that the bullfights would be good, and that ...”

“... used to live in Londonderry. If instead of meeting my dad at a dance in Dublin, she had met a young butcher called Martin from the Bogside, maybe I would be Martin Jr. There was an Oedipal twist to my unlikely fantasy, because I also used to imagine killing him. And it wasn’t just me. At lunch in the school canteen, between telling stories about ...”

“... Influenced by the very Englishly expressed Victorian socialism of William Morris, H.M. Hyndman and Robert Blatchford, the cause had been taken up and redirected by G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc in the first decade of the 20th century. It had been resumed in the 1920s by various other figures, including H.J. Massingham, a former guild socialist who ...”

“... Boydell launched his Shakespeare Gallery, commissioning artists to paint scenes from the plays; Robert Bowyer opened a gallery of paintings illustrating scenes from Hume’s History of England. These and other such ventures were to be funded both by exhibiting the paintings themselves and engraving them for sale, whether as prints to be framed or as book ...”

“... two women to be admitted to the Irish Republican Brotherhood. After the Rising was suppressed, Robert, her father, narrowly escaped the firing squad, and was in Lewes Prison when Maeve was born. Her childhood was punctuated by raids from ‘unfriendly men dressed in civilian clothes carrying revolvers’; they were looking for her father, who was often on ...”

“... out of the flesh of the prose as carefully as a piece of glass from a wound. What exactly does the young heroine of A World of Love have in mind when she reflects on her mistrust of ‘the past’s activity and its queeringness’? We could describe these idiosyncrasies as ‘modernist’: an authorial signature or calling card. But their real interest lies in ...”

“... economically in the words ‘uncouth of speech’. 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 ...”

“... appeared confused, irritated or bored by him, classic reactions of age to the heroes of youth. Robert Carringer’s sharp-eyed, dispassionate post-mortem on what actually happened in the making of Kane, and Barbara Leaming’s almost embarrassingly intimate monitoring of the variations in the maker’s oft-told tales during what turned out to be the last ...”

“... of syntax and the personification of abstract ideas (another of Wordsworth’s special hates). Robert Mack, properly enough, sets out to be Gray’s advocate and though not all his vindications of individual poems are persuasive, his biography does add an important consideration to our understanding of Gray’s poetic values, and therefore of his high ...”

“... the purposes of life now reigns in the thinking stratum of Chinese society, especially among the young. David Rice’s Dragon’s Brood is a marvellously fresh and immediate evocation of this confusion at what one might call the first level of perception – that of the serious visit. Rice is innocent of any real knowledge of Chinese culture or Chinese ...”

“... concern, all of them, and mine especially, for the power in the house is mine.’The anxious young man asserts himself here in a remarkable way. He virtually quotes an earlier hero, and that makes it particularly hard to assess the tone of his speech. In Book 6 of The Iliad Hector told his wife, Andromache, to go back to her weaving and leave war to ...”

“... On Wednesday, 25 September 1661, we find him making his way from St Martin’s Lane with Colonel Robert Slingsby: ‘He and I in his coach through the Mewes, which is the way that now all coaches are forced to go, because of a stop at Charing Cross, by reason of a drain there to clear the streets.’ He had been down that way the previous October, at St ...”