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“... it was only in my own lifetime,’ ‘Trousers didn’t have metal zips in those days,’ and so forth. But the narrating Peter is not just, or even mainly, a laudator temporis acti se puero. He is also, much of the time, a man who recalls ‘the old familiar straining at the crotch’. The quotation about trousers at the end of the last paragraph is one of ...”

“... T.S. Eliot and Prejudice. Keats and Embarrassment. The parallel between the title of Christopher Ricks’s new book and that of his earlier study of Keats is not accidental. In each case he takes a state of mind which is usually held to be disadvantageous, humanly and artistically speaking, and offers a critical re-examination of its presence in the work of his chosen author ...”

“... was shortlived, and as a descriptive term, misleading. Largely the creation of Craig Raine and Christopher Reid, the movement was characterised by, and remembered for, unusual similes and exotic descriptions. Its name derived from the title poem of Raine’s second collection, A Martian Sends a Postcard Home (1979), in which the Martian, rather like Robin ...”

“... he is unable to distinguish between the motion of the car and that of the world outside – and so forth. But the Martian is always emotionally alert to his experience of the human condition: he watches the emotional effect of books upon the body, without having any conception of the contents of books. He observes: In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps, that ...”

“... little more relaxed: in 1622 he allowed ‘all those lawful customs that are used for the setting forth of the outward solemnity thereof, as meeting of friends, accompanying the bridegroom and bride both to and from the church, putting on best apparel, feasting, with other tokens of joy, for which we have express warrant out of God’s word’ – but not ...”

“... Moore. As the book proceeds, however, it becomes increasingly clear that the action is bodying forth a fable: the story of a man who, having talked the talk, tries to walk the walk, and fails. The talk is Michael’s pedagogic emphasis on human strenuousness – on self-transcendence through confrontation with ‘Eros and Thanatos’. But confronted by ...”

“... arithmetic. ‘We do not teach your children to play ant games, adding numbers to numbers and so forth,’ she explains. ‘I hope you now understand why. We do not want to turn your children into ants.’The otherworldly Arroyos, the sinister, worldly Dmitri, and Simón, the sceptical man of reason who’s lacking in warmth, battle for David’s soul. Not ...”

“... I first came across Christopher Logue’s ‘account’ of the Iliad in 1975 at Oxford where I went to hear a vigorous reading by two young men of Patrocleia, his version of Book XVI. It was an opportunity to experience the poem in its original medium, by the ear rather than the eye. Homer himself had probably chanted his verses plucking the strings of a lyre, like the bard Demodocus in the Odyssey and for many centuries after his death people did not read Homer: they listened to skilled rhapsodes, whose dramatic delivery mesmerised audiences and earned the performers ample rewards, as we know from Plato’s Ion ...”

“... who had just killed his girlfriend with a similar weapon, it was ‘as if the city itself brought forth evidence from its own history’. Streets built in the 18th and 19th centuries adapt themselves to contemporary traffic through the city’s ‘ability to re-create itself silently and invisibly, as if it were truly a living thing’. The city also ‘seems ...”

“... the table and nobody else about, climbed on to the rocking-horse and slowly surging back and forth while the poor beast creaked, he told us a tale full of fascinating horrors, about a man who was condemned to dream bad dreams. One of them took the shape of a cow’s tail waving from a heap of dried fish. He went away as abruptly as he had come. Long ...”

“... fairly sure to hear of in the course of his schooling, you would be wise to put your money on Sir Christopher Wren. I think the equivalent holds good in Turkey. At least, I am writing this review in a school exercise-book I bought in Istanbul: the front cover bears a portrait of Mimar Sinan, and its reverse side gives a brief biography and enumerates the ...”

“... a version of the family romance (the re-connecting of parents with long-lost children and so forth). What they offer is a sentimental ‘humanising’ of the city that expels disorder and heals the wounds inflicted in the urban jungle. In this contrastive reading of the two novelists, Moretti is up-front about his own preferences: ‘What can I do, I ...”

“... but the logic was reactive; for all the talk of discovery, shock of the new and so forth, the real object of the Surrealist quest was a lost object of thought and imagination: what they called the ‘marvellous’ (the organising category of the first Manifeste du surréalisme). In this respect, the origins of Surrealism are firmly rooted in ...”

“... of fantastic, too good to be true dialogue. At the same time, she gets themes rolling back and forth between the narrative sections and the more essayistic material: personhood in ‘Babel in California’; love and desire in ‘The Possessed’; mortality in ‘Who Killed Tolstoy?’; cultural identity in ‘Summer in Samarkand’. Occasionally these ...”

“... Not long after, the discussion group was disbanded. The gatecrasher’s name, we learnt, was Christopher Hitchens, and he apparently did this sort of thing rather often, being famous for a sort of pyrotechnic brashness. Looking back, one realises that these were entirely apposite qualities for the successful journalist, which is very much what Hitchens ...”