“... Mann’s story, and despite its tragic ending, the work represented for Britten ‘everything that Peter and I have stood for’. Kitcher’s sympathy with literature is not untypical of contemporary philosophers. It leads him to claim indeed that literature can do – can be – philosophy inasmuch as it shows rather than tells, as against philosophy’s ...”

“... from the cold, he thought that just such a wind had blown … in the time of Ivan the Terrible and Peter, and in their time there had been just the same desperate poverty and hunger, the same thatched roofs with holes in them, ignorance, misery, the same desolation around, the same darkness, the same feeling of oppression – all these had existed, did ...”

“... or restored to remove scratches. But it never puts colour back into the cheeks of the dead: Peter Jackson’s dazzling transformation of the monochrome archive in They Shall Not Grow Old could not be further from Akomfrah’s mind. His actors warn us that remembrance comes in many guises, some of them unreliable. (He hints, too, at the allure of parade ...”

“... and his extensive espionage work on behalf of Robert Harley, Defoe was an indefatigable writer. Peter Earle, in the introduction to The World of Defoe (1976), confesses the alarm he experienced when ‘with the contract signed, I began to realise just what I had let myself in for ... To my horror I discovered that Defoe was probably the most prolific writer ...”

“... to the canon, and that whatever was written in the past had also to be printed, circulated and read. The New History is a move in this same, less exclusive direction: away from the merely singular, whether works of genius or authors, and towards whatever is representative in literature, of a time, a milieu, a genre, a creative kin-group – towards what ...”

“... the rise of Nazism by reference to the categories of British war mythology. Equally, no one could read Primo Levi’s If not now, when? and be in any doubt as to the extent or actuality of the suffering and barbarism for which Germany in those years was primarily, if not solely, responsible. ‘Try to understand, tell, and try and make others ...”

“... as one of the first volumes of the complete works of George Orwell, for which the editor, Dr Peter Davison, uses Orwell’s original manuscripts, letters and proofs to establish the text that Orwell would have wished to have. In the case of this work, among the most personal and directly political of Orwell’s writings, he has made particular use of the ...”

“... AJPT and Lewis, but Bruce McFarlane, John Morris, Rupert Cross, Cyril Darlington, J.Z. Young, Sir Peter Medawar, Gilbert Ryle ... the line stretched on. No doubt it was all more humdrum in reality, but one was left with the impression of great intellectual giants inhabiting a world of mad English eccentricity: an older world of indulgence, scandal, fun and ...”

“... Defeat of the Spanish Armada (1856-70), his early 20th-century biographers, Sidney Lee and Conyers Read, presented him as an astute and distinguished patriot who laid the foundations for the modern security services. But then Read’s three-volume study of 1925 reflected his own political preoccupations and professional ...”

“... keen to emphasise. ‘No Renaissance artist, with the exception of Andrea Mantegna, was able to read or write Latin.’ This is a bold claim, considering how little we know about most artists of that period, and not hard to challenge (Alberti wrote a treatise in Latin), but, if slightly qualified, the assertion would be salutary. The same applies to a claim ...”

“... alive, which made parishes with elderly vicars especially attractive. One newspaper notice of 1817 read: ‘Valuable church preferment – To be sold by Private Contract, the Right of the Next Presentation to the Vicarage of St Andrew, in the borough of Plymouth, in the County of Devon … upon the avoidance thereof of the present incumbent, who is nearly ...”

“... Mantel plays with a degree of ambiguity at the beginning of the book, that we are meant to read them as literal devils is never really in doubt. And what of Satan himself? Beyond Black offers us a typically understated portrait of the Fiends’ ringleader, a man called Nick. Returning home to the squat one day, Al meets an individual she has never seen ...”

“... has predecessors within the Zionist establishment. In The Holocaust in American Life (1999), Peter Novick noted that the Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin El-Husseini (a sworn enemy of both Zionists and British colonialism, who had met with Eichmann and had great expectations of a Nazi victory), was depicted in Gutman’s Encyclopedia as one of ...”

“... been a revelation: ‘The first thing my eye fell upon was a review of a book by Gertrude Stein. I read a quotation and found it like a foreign language, partly illuminated by the Holy Spirit.’ In Dublin in 1931 the Celtic Revival was still in full swing, and Kavanagh’s style at first suited it nicely. He was welcomed into literary society as the authentic ...”

“... reminded Corbière’s admirers of Villon. Verlaine noticed this affinity, and Pound, who had read Verlaine, passed it on. Randall Jarrell returned to the comparison in a brief essay on Corbière, published in Poetry and the Age, where he praised the ‘cruel and magical tenderness’ of the verse. The figure who emerges at the end of the poem to embody ...”