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“... I was God.’ Once a god, always a god? And yet always a reviser. On other days he can sound like Philip Larkin. Were there two Lowells, or only one? Lowell employed the term ‘dual personality’, a term which belongs to literature, and which also belongs to 19th-century medicine. The meaning of the term has remained uncertain: but it is certain that ...”

“... a certain point he seems never to have spoken or responded to language again), he drew constantly, producing large, hypnotic images on brown paper bags or donated rolls of examining-table paper of the type you see in doctors’ surgeries. His characteristic subjects include arid Mexican landscapes and hills (often with train tunnels and trains ...”

“... bordering on ‘minstrelsy’, contrasted sharply with the work of Bellow and Norman Mailer and Philip Roth, who had ‘not shown a great interest in the shadow of the Shoah’.A strenuously willed affiliation with the Shoah has also marked and diminished much American journalism about Israel. More consequentially, the secular-political religion of the ...”

“... face, and then dogged him with stealthy footsteps, passing and repassing him many times.’ Wilde drew on many sources as well as Stevenson for his novel. He took the motif of the portrait from his own great-uncle Charles Maturin’s novel Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). He also added his own version of the Faustian pact to an Irish legend, the story of ‘Tír ...”

“... of Vietminh strongholds in the South. US General John ‘Iron Mike’ O’Daniel instead drew up his own plan for a mobile force to attack the Vietminh in the North. With no great enthusiasm Navarre went along with it. Informed of what O’Daniel called the ‘Navarre Plan’ to win the war, Congress approved a further $385 million to pay for ...”

“... help with Harry Potter.3 But both Ursula le Guin (in her great Earthsea trilogy, 1968-73) and Philip Pullman (in his trilogy, His Dark Materials, 1995-2000) developed evocative and consistent naming systems for their imagined worlds without going on and on about it. Of course Iorek Byrnison, one of the armoured bears in Pullman, is linguistically ...”

“... much she could have said to them, but she had met T.S. Eliot, too, and there was Priestley and Philip Larkin and even Ted Hughes, to whom she’d taken a bit of a shine but who remained nonplussed in her presence. And it was because she had at that time read so little of what they had written that she could not find anything to say and they, of course, had ...”

“... beyond the common markets in which post-modernism can flourish. Early in 1991, Tatyana Tolstaya drew attention to such a region in western Eurasia not far beyond Europe: ‘in the West the sense of history has weakened or completely vanished; the West does not live in history, it lives in civilisation (by which I mean the self-awareness of transnational ...”

“... the bin they’re about to clear. Bernard ends his letter with a look at the UN special rapporteur Philip Alston’s blistering report on poverty and human rights in the UK, and repeats Alston’s warning that Brexit will do nothing to remedy the plight of Britain’s poor. Jeremy Harding Germany‘Just left Frankfurt. Great meetings, great weather, really ...”

“... of Ladyton, or John Hutton, now Baron Hutton of Furness, or Bob Ainsworth, or the Conservatives’ Philip Hammond or Liam Fox – was prepared to answer. For those not directly affected, the acceptable form of exculpation and remembrance involves obliterating any consideration of dead Afghans and folding the British war dead into a single mass of noble ...”

“... team, led by the late Sir Michael Havers; the juniors were Michael Hill, Paul Purnell and Philip Havers (Sir Michael’s son). The three juniors at a later point signed a note listing, among others, Conlon’s alibi witnesses. They included Burke’s name on the list. However, a separate list later made available to the defence unaccountably omitted ...”

“... and also get, a hit of solid senior-common-room emollience.The lifelong strength that Berlin drew from his 1917 baptism was, however, often applied in less obvious ways. I was fascinated to learn, from Ignatieff, that his Latvian family had a direct kinship with the Schneerson clan who ran, and still run, the fanatical sect known as Lubavitch or ...”

“... slight Northern accent. He was one of a large family: Abe; then Bec, the one girl; then my father, Philip, called Phil but Phishel at home, from his Hebrew name, Feisal; then Jack, Harry, Sid, Dave and Louis. Their father was a tailor, one who earned too little, with all those mouths to feed, to be able to buy shoes for his children to wear to school. At 13 or ...”