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“... Stevie Smith said that she was straightforward, but not simple, which is a version of not waving but drowning. She presented to the world the face which is invented when reticence goes over to the attack, and becomes mystification. If you visited Blake and were told not to sit on a certain chair because it was for the spirit of Michelangelo, or if Emily Dickinson handed you a single flower, you needed time to find out how far the mystification was meant to keep you at a distance, and to give you something to talk about when you got home ...”

“... any one in Holy Orders [Johnson] habitually listened with a grace and charming deference … What drew the blasting flash must have been not the question itself, but the manner in which it was asked … Say the words aloud: ‘Were not Dodd’s sermons addressed to the passions?’ They are words which, if you have any dramatic and histrionic sense, cannot be ...”

“... It’s part of the general atmosphere of fin de règne. Mhanda was the sort of young boy in Ian Smith’s Rhodesia who was bound to grow up to become a guerrilla. His father was a keen African nationalist and his childhood heroes were not singers or soccer stars but Nkrumah, Sekou Touré and Kenyatta. He went to the primary school at Zvishavane which the ...”

“... the Society. Not long ago I received the present of a book called The English Companion by Godfrey Smith.* This is described on the dust-cover as ‘An Idiosyncratic A to Z of England and Englishness’. Godfrey Smith’s taste is wide: towns, shops, sports, epochs, writers, eatables. Public Schools come next to Pubs, and ...”

“... Shortly after her husband’s death, Joy Williams entrusted the task to the Welsh historian Dai Smith, who had known (and greatly admired) Williams in the last decade or so of his life, and who shared many of his political allegiances. Smith was given unrestricted access to Williams’s papers; as, in effect, the ...”

“... dangling from the crow’s nest at the bottom of the ocean. The captain of the Titanic, Edward Smith, had known all day that he was heading into ice. Not only had the weather turned much colder: messages had been received from four other ships warning him that there were icebergs in the vicinity. Just before lunch ...”

“... of skulduggery emerged. In 1992, Conor Cruise O’Brien and the Australian diplomat George Ivan Smith, both of whom were working for the UN in the Congo in the early 1960s, wrote to the Guardian arguing that Hammarskjöld had been the victim of a kidnap that went wrong. The following year, in another letter to the Guardian, Bengt Rosio, the former Swedish ...”

“... which were so distinctively of the French 19th century in character that Timothy Wilson-Smith’s biography leaves the British reader feeling around for something familiar to get a grip on. Perhaps one should first rid oneself of the idea that Delacroix’s Anglophilia is going to be any help, and assume that England, as much as Morocco, was ...”

“... culture featured one of Botticelli’s illustrations to the Divine Comedy, but claimed that Dante drew it, there would be an outcry. Do publishers think that dead Arab painters don’t really matter? Fortunately, the text of The Middle East has not been written by the author of the captions. Bernard Lewis, Emeritus Professor of Near Eastern Studies at ...”

“... her out as different from her wealthier classmates. Swimming offered a form of belonging. What drew her to the pool wasn’t fame – she knew early on she would never be a star – but the quieter pleasure of competence, the ‘unwavering details of technical precision’, the team sweatshirts that made her ‘look like something recognisable’, the ...”

“... war and peace around Crimea, Byelorussia, Kiev and Odessa (I use the spellings chosen by Douglas Smith in the book), all places of which we have a more recent and incompatible sense; a prose writer from a time when prose writers were eclipsed by poets (Blok, Bely, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Tsvetayeva, Pasternak, Yesenin, Mayakovsky); who was himself, in the ...”

“... a divided Malian army has fallen apart; on whom shall we lean? Within days, the Villepin doctrine drew strength from events on the ground. French forces began operations with aerial bombardments of Islamist strongholds in northern Mali, a desert two and a half times the size of the United Kingdom; one helicopter pilot was killed. So ended the hope of ‘zero ...”

“... Anthology, edited by the polymath collector, underground film-maker, and beatnik shaman Harry Smith, is arcane, but the critical world has been primed for its reappearance. Robert Cantwell’s When We Were Good and Greil Marcus’s The Invisible Republic – recent accounts of the curious development of American folk music – both devote considerable ...”

“... physis and nomos, and this made me think the antithesis a premonition of the one which Galton drew between nature and nurture. I liked this and was pleased to see that my children’s edition of Liddell and Scott renders nomos as a ‘feeding-place for cattle, pasture’. Nisbet enfolds the history and literary usage of ‘anomy’ with the degree of ...”

“... of time, we thought, as we strolled along the Namibia road. The afternoon came and went; night drew on; few cars passed; none stopped. We pitched the tent at the side of the road. I spent a sleepless night, worrying about marauding elephants and the encroaching unlawfulness of our presence in the country. Salvation arrived gratifyingly soon after the sun ...”