“... now recognise, in G.S. Fraser’s anthology Poetry Now (1956). It appeared again that same year in Robert Conquest’s anthology New Lines, and I fear I did not then recognise in it, as I do now, perhaps the finest poem in that volume, and certainly the most surprising. It is, I suppose and hope, well-known: but it isn’t famous – as it deserves to be. It ...”

“... see Auld Reekie,’ Stevenson wrote to his fellow Scottish novelist S.R. Crockett from Samoa in May 1893, eighteen months before his death: ‘I shall never set my foot upon the heather. Here I am until I die and here will I be buried.’ But, as he told another correspondent, his head was ‘filled with the blessed, beastly place [i.e. Scotland] all the ...”

“... of South Africa, which seeks to anticipate almost every conceivable problem and circumstance that may arise in the future. What, exactly, constitutes the ‘equal protection of the law’ guaranteed to citizens by the Fourteenth Amendment? How far may Congress go to promote the ‘general welfare’? The Constitution’s ...”

“... of ‘one life, one writing’, although not at all in the proudly psychopathic sense in which Robert Lowell threw off that phrase. Few writers can have been less disturbed in the psyche than Mrs Gaskell, and the fact suggests the uncomfortable old cliché that virtue and good writing hardly ever go together. With her heart in the right place she wrote ...”

“... you happen to be subjecting the neighbours to home movies. The ashtrays are overflowing. There may be an alcoholic, active or reformed, lying on the living-room sofa. Is he thinking about the pint of whiskey he has hidden under the cushions; or has he just got home from an exhausting AA meeting? He has a job he does not like and is not getting on with his ...”

“... governments: so far even the rich haven’t been able to buy their way out of a traffic jam. This may change – we might yet see bus lanes redesignated as toll lanes. The contributors to Autopia grapple with these problems, but for the most part not very energetically. Allen Samuels tells us that the car ‘like all epochal icons . . . does not mean one ...”

“... in return. But so-called ‘reciprocal altruism’ isn’t authentically unselfish (as admitted by Robert Trivers, who coined the phrase) if the anticipated benefit is greater than the immediate cost. It’s therefore just as well for us all that altruism takes other forms too. People often bear costs not only in reproductive fitness but in material ...”

“... bands. One of the earliest was the Cyfarthfa band, in the iron-smelting centre of Merthyr Tydfil. Robert Crawshay, the owner of the Cyfarthfa works, in effect created a private orchestra. He employed a family of musicians from Bradford, members of London theatre orchestras and strolling players; and, like some Renaissance prince or 17th-century cardinal, gave ...”

“... seeing it as a specific feature of Elizabethan-Renaissance men and women. Well, Forman may have been a one-off city goat, as his contemporary the Italian miller Menocchio, recorded by Carlo Ginzburg, may have been a one-off village sceptic; but you can’t deny that he provides a heap of evidence about the ...”

“... Spraggs writes, ‘that it has even been suggested that the astute professional malefactor may well have regarded clerical status as a useful qualification. A cleric could not be executed, though he might be jailed.’ The Folvilles’ plea that they were trying to right wrongs that could not be rectified otherwise was the standard justification of the ...”

“... her text – is the transformation of this primal rage in the work of art. ‘The motivation may be murderous,’ she asserts, ‘but the form must be absolutely strict and pure.’ Nowhere is this paradoxical combination of uncontrolled rage and self-conscious formal absorption better captured than in the 1993 documentary film about Bourgeois directed ...”

“... of Mr Love in Mr Hayter, Miss Joy casts against type, and finds happiness. Changing your name may be what restores you to yourself. Miss Joy is truly joyful in the end, by virtue of becoming Mrs Hayter. There is a romantic novel to be glimpsed in this stanza: how, we might ask, did Miss Joy part company with Mr Love? Did she only choose him, but not marry ...”

“... phrase, is said to be delineated more clearly here than in earlier accounts. The claim may be conceded: but not all veils are drawn aside. In 1896 Churchill was ‘an intolerable nuisance’, according to Birkenhead, in his fruitless efforts to avoid the ‘tedious land of India’ and to scramble into a scene of military action and glory. We are ...”

“... and phrase-books in rare cases of need. Cameras are customary, but not essential. Movie-cameras may be used, but natives sometimes resent them. Travel may now be impossible, but travel-writing is, perhaps for that reason, much prized. To be a travel-writer, one must explore a far-flung, outlandish place and report the ...”

“... Convention of 1907. Francis Younghusband was more or less born into the Great Game. His uncle was Robert Shaw, British Political Agent in Yarkand; his father was John Younghusband, Inspector-General of Police in the Punjab, and occasional lecturer on the Russian menace. At school at Clifton, his great friend was Henry Newbolt (‘The sand of the desert is ...”