“... true. Most philosophers who contest this view deny the first of these propositions; they treat the more abstract entities to which the theories ostensibly refer as convenient fictions which are introduced for the purpose of linking observable phenomena. Van Fraassen takes the much less common and indeed rather surprising course of accepting the first ...”

“... for treason there was no longer a Howard presence at Court and Henry’s activities became even more restricted. Nevertheless, what Dr Peck shows is that during those bleak years when the sun of Royal favour no longer shone on the Norfolks, the cleverest member of the family was not wasting any time. He supported Mary Queen of Scots and through her the ...”

“... Perhaps​ because it’s based on a lively trilogy of novels for supposed teenagers, more probably because its writers and directors knew how to have a good time with stereotypes, The Hunger Games movie series is attractive because it is so eclectic, because it raids whatever cultural bank or shopping mall is handy ...”

“... as a single frame can come to telling a sequential story. In the opening pages of The Woodlanders Thomas Hardy shows light pulling fragments of life out of darkness in much the same way. A stranger approaches a village: ‘they turned into a half-invisible little lane, whence, as it reached the verge of an eminence, could be discerned in the dusk, about half ...”

“... land, let’s say.There are drawbacks to such a view. There are moments when we can’t take any more hovering, and Petzold’s timing and tone can be awkward. But he is faithful to his scheme, and his new film, Afire (an imaginative translation of what more literally is ‘Red Sky’), has a much lighter touch than any of ...”

“... the sheep have been stabled with the goats. To take just one example, the marble portrait bust of Thomas Baker – wonderful whether it came from Bernini’s hand or just from his workshop – is shown not in stand-alone art mode but in explanatory design-history mode. Above him to the left is a copy of van Dyck’s triple portrait of Charles I. Baker took ...”

“... This​ book is a departure from John Carey’s normal mode, much more intently introductory than anything else he has written in a long and distinguished career. A Little History of Poetry canters from Gilgamesh and Homer to Mary Oliver and Les Murray in three hundred pages with a breezy sense of mission, assuming in the reader no previous acquaintance with the subject (‘Confessional poetry is poetry that reveals personal confidences, especially relating to mental illness and hospitalisation’) or indeed with other sorts of knowledge that might be thought fairly general (‘Totalitarian regimes seek to control every aspect of life, including writing ...”

“... Easter occurs on the first Sunday after the Paschal Full Moon. But the lunar month and year are no more divisible by seven than the solar year. The seven days of Creation, on the last of which God rested, were not a clear model for Christian calendars. Calvin denounced the idea that the seven-day week was divinely ordained as ‘crass and carnal Sabbatarian ...”

“... in many minds between deformities of language and acts of delinquency, an association made all the more glibly when the delinquency is an act of violence. Why doubt that when an English jury hears evidence being given in a sociolect normally heard only in the mouths of television or film hoodlums, some at least of its members will presume that whoever speaks ...”

“... were fairly clear, but during the 19th century what it was to be British or English became a far more contested question. This was partly because the rise of manufacturing towns mocked the roast beef and Plymouth Hoe images of the ‘olden time’, but more important was an ambiguity inherent in the country’s ...”

“... towards the sun, exalted and ecstatic, breathing the thin air of the empyrean’. One might, more meanly, say that an important part of their extreme love for each other was the sense it gave them of their great superiority to everyone else. In a life in which what mattered most was to be grand and free and take risks and have adventures and generally be ...”

“... to the subtitle of Mary Shelley’s book, Mr Harris’s costume and make-up probably owed more to stage adaptations of Frankenstein than to the novel itself. Richard Brinsley Peake’s Presumption: or the Fate of Frankenstein, which opened on 28 July 1823, ran for 37 performances in London, with Mr T.P. Cooke a great success in the role of ...”

“... His other long narrative poem, The Rape of Lucrece, was less popular, but it, too, circulated far more widely than any of the plays, appearing in six editions during his life, and in two more by 1640. The most popular of the plays were Richard III and Richard II, each of which went through five editions before 1616. Romeo ...”

“... the punters a bit of history and a bit of literature, and perhaps a bit of gossip, and what’s more it saves them the trouble of reading history. And poems too, for that matter. Not to mention the ordeal of ploughing through a load of literary criticism. But there are two respects in which literary biography is intrinsically pernicious, however well it’s ...”

“... send for them. What money he sent was seized by the older relatives, now avowed enemies of the more gentle second wife and her children, and ready to drive them out. In 1910 they left for the city of Van, where they lived through the massacres of 1915, then perilously escaped Turkey on foot to settle in Yerevan in Russian Armenia. In 1919 his mother ...”