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“... contradictions’. Two of the most stylish essays are by John Daverio, who drowned in the Charles River in Boston in March 2003, a death that may have been accidental but eerily echoes Schumann’s plunge into the Rhine at a similar time of year. His first essay surveys Schumann’s early piano music, dwelling on its exuberant play with masks and ...”

“... in every language, Therefore unreal, out beyond a gap No one can cross, figures inside a mirror. Charles Boyle – a stouter Carcanet poet – would sooner lose his touring bike, his rucksack, all his travellers cheques, than admit such diminution. Ranging between London and North Africa, Israel and somewhere (close to Jamestown?) called Merriland, his new ...”

“... a departure and which are still displayed and proposed in the face of it. To be unmoved by such a passage, and to resist it, is in effect to resist all Bloch. But even those who feel compelled to do so on principle, or for some other reason, may yet recognise the injustice of Kolakowski’s charge that facts for Bloch ‘have no ontological meaning and may be ...”

“... by himself. In the superb catalogue of the exhibitions devoted to Vasari in Arezzo in 1981, Charles Davis subjected this passage to careful scrutiny. He discovered that many of Alessandro Farnese’s dinner guests listed by Vasari were dead or absent from Rome at the time, and pointed out that this account of the ...”

“... his wrecking of that achievement – to dehumanise Melville as man and artist.’ This summarising passage cannot be called literary criticism; it is a plea of sorts, not on behalf of Pierre but of Melville. Like the Introduction as a whole, the passage fudges the critical issues it raises. Why, one wants to know, is ...”

“... organic intellectual of the EU. Though related, applause and achievement are not the same. The Passage to Europe: How a Continent Became a Union, which catapulted van Middelaar to fame and the precincts of power, is a remarkable work. The tones in which it was received are of another order. ‘There are books,’ a Belgian reviewer declared, ‘before ...”

“... of not yielding much if you give it the attention which its thought-provoking air solicits. The passage is also hard, indeed impossible, to reconcile with the idea that Victorian bourgeois sexual plenitude was a rebellion against restraint: but at an earlier point Professor Gay elaborates his Flaubertian title as a ‘re-education of the senses’. And he ...”

“... not the habitual ones, so that ‘everyone recognises me in my book and my book in me.’ In a passage added late in life, he describes the effects of continuing self-description: ‘By portraying myself for others I have portrayed my own self within me in clearer colours than I possessed at first. I have not made my book any more than it has made me – a ...”

“... and massive enforced population movement. On 6 May 1527 the Spanish, German and Italian troops of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain, sacked the city, assaulting and slaughtering its citizens, pillaging and violating sacred spaces and objects. The level of violence reported in eyewitness accounts shocked the rest of Europe, even after decades of ...”

“... Rose ended up sewing in a workhouse after her tenth child, Annie, was born. Beatrice married Charles Leaworthy (the brother of Maud’s husband, Walter) in Pontypridd in 1919 and gave birth to Iris one year later, entering into a life of agricultural insecurity in the backwaters of South Wales and the West Country. ...”

“... that centuries other than ours had different views on the subject, especially when I came across Charles Wesley’s verses (written in August 1744 on the morrow of a Cardiff Methodist’s funeral) whose rollicking anapaests were widely reprinted for congregational singing: Ah! lovely Appearance of Death!    No Sight upon Earth is so fair Not all the gay ...”

“... or even as being in love with him, or indeed as in any way acquainted with him. Shearman cites a passage in Petrarch in which the poet observes that ‘even David wept for the deaths of Absalom and of Saul.’ But that hardly supports his case; it merely asserts that even a warrior can have a soft heart. A footnote mentions Boccaccio’s ‘Rime’ in which ...”

“... conjunctions with change in empires. He noted the rulership of Saturn over India, and copied out a passage of a work deriving from Bacon which said that the law of Mohammed could not last more than 693 years. They were all wrong, although modern America seems slow to absorb this lesson. In England, the Armada prophecies stemmed from predictions of a ...”

“... States are pertinent here; and Goubert identifies one particularly interesting ‘reverse’ passage on the subject of the body by an English writer on science, S. Parkes, whose book The Chemical Catechism was published in 1818: ‘The human body is itself a laboratory, in which by the various functions of secretion, absorption, etc., composition and ...”

“... the pair (both provincials, of course) whom Kenner singled out as the most honourable exceptions: Charles Tomlinson, who applauded William Soutar, and Basil Bunting, who befriended MacDiarmid. Yet Tomlinson and Bunting are the true mavericks, as Kenner recognised. They are mavericks because, while acknowledging class-based and region-based resentment, in ...”