“... of a more rhapsodical and isolated kind. Thomas felt lucky to get a smell of printer’s ink so young, but his success proved to be a mixed blessing. It instantly typecast him as ‘a country writer’, and discouraged attempts he might otherwise have made to conform more closely to his father’s model. When he went from St Paul’s to Oxford in 1897 ...”

“... outside ourselves of all that is bad in the world and in us. In The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil called this process the making of ‘displeasure-images’, and identified it as ‘part of the oldest psychotechnical apparatus mankind possesses’. Together with our tendency to take things figuratively, this is the mechanism which complies with ...”

“... unself-conscious or natural. Even when male literary theorists (such as Wayne Booth, Robert Scholes and Terry Eagleton) have taken an interest in feminist criticism, they have seen problems of sexual difference as women’s problems, addressing – to use Jonathan Culler’s terms – the issue of ‘reading as a woman’ but assuming that ...”

“... as the ‘human sciences’, which, simply on the lexical plane, establishes a bridge between the young sociology (for example) and the old, but still valid, Humanities of our grandparents. On the whole, Hexter’s positive assessment of this French superiority (for once!) seems to me pertinent, though pleasantly flattering too to my tricoloured ...”

“... In the meantime, however, the United Irishmen were pushed back into self-reliance, manifested in Robert Emmet’s attempted insurrection of 1803. Elliott gives this as much space as Hoche’s expedition, though it had no concrete connection with France. Like the rest of her book, apart from broad-ranging introductory and concluding chapters, this account is ...”

“... with ease – a quality he admired in Romilly? Or was it his fear of death, so intense when he was young and conquered only when he came to die? Or was it some extension of his ego? All novelists are egoists who spin their characters from observing themselves as much as other people and choose subject-matter from their experience. But Philip Toynbee’s ego ...”

“... III, yet he positioned himself as the voice of science and reason, above the quotidian fray.As a young man, caught up in the turmoil of 1848, Renan wrote a manifesto, ‘The Future of Science’, which gave confident expression to his hopes that disinterested inquiry would increasingly dispel superstition and confusion. But, perhaps for reasons of ...”

“... meaning. One touchstone is Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), in which the camera stalks young Danny at just above ground level as he pedals his tricycle down the interminable featureless passageways of the Overlook Hotel. ‘The Shining,’ Luckhurst concludes, ‘revealed something about the emotional latency of corridors: a simple lesson in the ...”

“... his grandmother, but not to any of his siblings, displaced as they were around the plantation.As a young boy he was stoical and resourceful. He had a habit of singing outside the window of Lucretia Auld, his owner’s daughter – a ploy she ‘very soon came to understand as a petition for a piece of bread’. He was exposed to countless acts of brutality: a ...”

“... Strane with her therapist; she trusts that nobody else will understand. ‘It wasn’t about how young I was, not for him,’ she explains in a summary introduction that primes the reader for a lengthy statement of denial.Above everything else, he loved my mind. He said I had genius-level emotional intelligence and that I wrote like a prodigy, that he could ...”

“... ripe for resolution, often because the necessary laboratory techniques have just come on stream. Robert Koch’s choice of anthrax in 1873 is a brilliant instance of this. Thanks to anthrax, he founded bacteriology as a science and in little over a decade catapulted himself from the life of a rural doctor in a small town in Posen – a province of the Second ...”

“... It is lifted out, suspended, musing, as in ‘A Morning in Vicenza’: The sun was so fragile, so young, that we were a little scared; a careless move might scratch it, just a shout – if anyone had tried – might do it harm; only the rushing swifts, with wings hard as cast-iron, were free to sing out loud, because they’d spent their brief, uneasy ...”

“... the material that came out of Wales and Ireland, farms and fishing, men’s work with horses. Like Robert Roberts, another recorder of the lives of the poor born at the end of the last century, Evans grew up in a grocer’s shop – not in the classic slum of Salford, but in the mining valley of Abercynon. The children of shopkeepers in poor working-class ...”

“... dread, how about it?’) At the moment, literary Stockholm is abuzz over a stunt pulled by a young poet, whose acclaimed new book has just turned out to be entirely plagiarised from translations of American poets called Robert – Creeley, Mezey, Bly, Lowell, Penn Warren etc. The perpetrator had sent a copy of the book ...”

“... were increasingly split by the advance of education between the multiplying numbers of literate young, for whom modernity was the key to social betterment, and the elders, who controlled the institutions of the village community and wanted to hold the outside world at bay – both groups being revolutionary in their different ways. It is that the Russian ...”