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“... St Paul’s’ (a building which he completed in 1710). Hill’s poem lives locally in these small, self-delighting verbal graces that can have the air of deft contrivance or happy accident, while its more momentous and even ominous compulsions work themselves out on the grand scale, as though occupying some other part of the poet’s mind. ‘Again I ...”

“... hundred years ago I find absurdly satisfying. As I’m stroking this paint I become aware of a small child cowering in an alcove, playing hide and seek and who obviously thinks I am mad. On the hill south of the main buildings is the Applegarth, where there are two yew trees, unvisited by any tourists but survivors of a group of seven such trees that had ...”

“... life. [cut to]Herb: [pouring champagne] I feel like a sultan of Araby and my tent is graced with Helen of Troy.Joan: Those are two different stories. [cut to]Don: He’d just seen that unattainable object speed by out of reach. Because they do that, don’t they? Beautiful things. [cut to]Herb: [to Joan’s décolletage] You know, I don’t know how much ...”

“... National Park? Or flowers and shrubs? When in 1969 she started going to a therapist called Helen Boigon, the dark revelations she spewed out were, it seemed, endless, and made more so by Boigon herself spilling the beans to biographers in the aftermath of Arbus’s suicide. ‘At their first session,’ Lubow reveals, ‘Diane got down on the floor and ...”

“... the next day’s media coverage would not be about our policing policies.’ It may seem like a small point, but by placing the quote marks there he changes the sense of what he said. It implies he thought she was somewhat bigoted. Yet he actually sounded like he was calling her the kind of bigot he knew all too well. It’s a tiny detail, and it makes all ...”

“... unrest and in favour of rearmament, than Maclean’s Scottish section). The left remained a small minority: George Barnes, who won Glasgow Blackfriars and Hutchesontown in the 1906 election, was still the only Labour MP in the city during the First World War. ‘The world is gettin’ socialism now like the measles,’ John Buchan’s old Borders ...”

“... They estimate it would include between three and four thousand people. ‘If the needs of that small group are not properly met,’ the Report says, ‘care in the community will be discredited ... We do not think that as a society we can afford to let that happen.’ The Mental Health Foundation, however, disagrees, largely because it thinks that such ...”

“... than Rachel Whiteread’s Ghost – the negative plaster life-cast of the inside space of a small room from an old home? It’s a pity Saatchi doesn’t have it out always. Among this body of work, Whiteread’s is in a class apart. None of my general reservations apply to it. But any categorical aesthetic gib – any argument about a whole kind of art ...”

“... a distinctive philosophy expressed in a distinctive manner.’ In the most recent collection of Helen Simpson’s sophisticated stories about housebound wives, teenage girls and (above all) babies, a schoolgirl one spring day meditates on the poet: ‘Coleridge was a minefield. Just when you thought he’d said something really brilliant, he went raving off ...”

“... or our relationships with other species. John Bradshaw’s In Defence of Dogs (2011), Helen Macdonald’s memoir H Is for Hawk (2014), the primatologist Frans de Waal’s Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (2016) and the ‘scuba-diving philosopher’ Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Human Life ...”

“... as a number of private tutoring institutions across the world have long done. It promises small-group tuition, and several academic superstars who hold full-time appointments at universities in Britain and the US feature in its advertising as ‘visiting professors’. For this it charges fees of £18,000 a year, twice the maximum that even the most ...”

“... Mine be thy love, and thy love’s use their treasure. In The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Helen Vendler points out that ‘the individual letters of the word “h-e-w-s” (the Quarto spelling) or “h-u-e-s” [are] in as many lines as possible’ in Sonnet 20. She also notes the ‘unique case’ of feminine rhymes throughout the sonnet. Woods ...”

“... she wrote in one post, next to a Union Jack, and ‘Live in London’, beside an emoji of a small house and a very green tree. She liked to imagine that one day she would live in a house like that with her husband, Hassan, and their two daughters. Hassan used to work at the mosque. Later on, when he was spending more time away, Rania would send him ...”

“... what they do remains a development of these relatively primitive manoeuvres. I have paraded this small selection of technical terms so that you can say that you neither want nor need them; if you do feel that, you differ from professional narratologists, who rejoice in the apparatus and the neologisms; they have what Gerald Prince, a senior narratologist ...”

“... half hour when she invested him with the CH. Mouselike and shy he had said little and in such a small voice she had found him almost impossible to communicate with. Still, he was a bit of a dark horse. Sitting there with his hands pressed together like something out of Alice in Wonderland he gave no hint of what he was thinking and so she was pleasantly ...”