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“... I have delayed and fussed, despaired and dithered, and rewritten the first half several times. Paul Strohm, to whom I went for advice early on, has written and published his own in the interim.1 But perhaps at last the mist is clearing. How does one write a literary biography of a figure from the long past? My slowness has been fostered by a jumble of ...”

“... moment in the Inferno when Paolo and Francesca share ‘a kiss both looked-for and unbidden’ (in Paul Batchelor’s translation) as they read. That’s another thing: Smith’s literariness comes through here as something more amusing; fragments with titles such as ‘Speak, radio’ and ‘Brideshead unvisited’ open up the story to give a parallel ...”

“... defined groups: administrators, academics and fee-paying students. The origins of this arrangement lay in 19th-century Berlin, and Humboldt University, founded in 1810 in the aftermath of Napoleon’s conquest of Prussia. The African university makes its appearance later in the 19th century. At the southern end of the continent, colleges were started from ...”

“... school exercise book and becomes the conduit for a writerly correspondence; a disregarded copy of Paul Bowles’s Let it Come Down lolls on the counter of a pub, a gift already regretted; another gift, received from a stranger by the 17-year-old narrator while she is working on checkout 19 at the local supermarket, sits unopened by the till:I put the book on ...”

“... the gutter. When at last he impassively joined his wife, he sat Lulu next to her while he himself lay recumbent at their feet. The taxi-driver, like the man Magritte had kicked some thirty years before, was so thrown by this ‘solution’ that he drove off without a word. Such behaviour, while diverting, is not so very surprising. What I did find mildly out ...”

“... wife, Lesley Balfour Dunn, in March 1981, and they love and celebrate her as she lived and as she lay dying. I first met Lesley in 1968 and I last saw her a fortnight before her death – wasted, heroic, witty and ‘turning down painkillers for lucidity’, as Dunn writes in a poem which remembers the friends who called at the house in the final ...”

“... Masters of the Prieuré de Sion. They had found grounds for thinking that some other institution lay behind the foundation both of the Templars and the Cistercians, and this they tentatively identified with the Prieuré de Sion, an order whose headquarters was the Abbaye de Notre Dame de Mont Sion in the Frankish kingdom of Jerusalem at the beginning of the ...”

“... The trouble Nozick (like other ‘speculative’ philosophers – Hegel, Whitehead, John Findlay, Paul Weiss) runs into here is that while explaining in the positivist’s strong ‘testable’ sense is obviously too much to expect of philosophers, explaining in Nozick’s weaker sense looks much too easy. Suppose that we want, as Nozick rightly says we do, a ...”

“... the emperor was trying to make. The focus of his book is the dissimulation and hypocrisy that lay at the heart of Roman imperial politics, and had in a sense been the foundation of the governmental system established by Augustus. In making one-man rule work successfully at Rome, after almost half a millennium of (more or less) democracy, and establishing ...”

“... a prominent role in the suppression of the Irish rebellion of 1798, whose ideological origins lay in the radicalism of Presbyterian Belfast, but which developed a curious sectarian momentum, becoming in many respects a Roman Catholic revolt. The rebellion raised union to the top of the political agenda, though Castlereagh had already begun to contemplate ...”

“... in finding a position abroad. For the next five years, Cavell was governess to the children of Paul François, a well-off Brussels lawyer. The children remembered her as a kind and imaginative teacher, but also as very proper and very English: the self-repression that would strike later acquaintances had already marked her character. To her ...”

“... transcend comment. On the steps of Turin cathedral on 13 April of this year. Pope John Paul concluded a morose diatribe on the emptiness and malignity of modern capitalist society with a ringing proclamation: ‘But there is Christ and he is sufficient for all time.’ Three centuries or so earlier, Blaise Pascal summarised the theme of his apology ...”

“... artists and intellectuals. His friendships with painters and photographers, notably Edward Weston, Paul Strand and Alfred Steiglitz, are preserved in some fine portraits reproduced in English’s book; for their part, the Americans seem to have seen in O’Malley’s uncompromising features the lineaments of the essential revolutionary, a Bazarov of his ...”

“... of Hjalli the coward. Little does it quake as it lies on the plate. It quaked still less when it lay in his breast. He does this, of course, so that he can laugh at his tormentors, secure in the knowledge that he is even less likely to talk than his brother was. And the whole scene betrays an intense cultural delight in self-control, impassivity, grinning ...”

“... dying out unnoticed. The Codex Regius of Eddic poetry, greatest memorial of Northern literature, lay unknown to the rest of the world in an Icelandic farmhouse for some four hundred years till Bishop Brynjólfur Sveinsson acquired it in 1643. Then the news began, slowly, to leak out. The OED records ‘Viking’ as a word first used in 1807, and it had been ...”