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“... l’histoire, et l’histoire n’en regorge point’ – the rhythm may actually be stronger in James Brook’s unpretentious translation). Even if the allusion is clear – to Ecclesiastes 1.6-7, ‘All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full’ – one must be ready to entertain the notion that Debord’s version, at least for our place ...”

“... In New York City I wasn’t told That mid-May nights in Vermont can be cold. Outside, our brook, short of sun And wind, barely keeps up a run, Just jogs and limps so as not to freeze; Flexing her black tender knees, The mare between the moon and the gate Crops fiercely as if she couldn’t wait For the calories to turn to heating, And is blindly warming herself by eating; Overhead, chipmunks shiver in rows, Or heaps, or whatever racial pose Chipmunks adopt; if there were lights, The woods would be circus-crammed with sights – Hedgehogs on inchmeal expeditions, Toads in cool conjugal positions, Somewhere the bug that bit me lying Jubilant with my blood and dying, Jays, if you can imagine it, keeping Quiet, drops from bathers creeping Back to huddle inside the lake, And in the corridors where the snake Exerts his snakiness unmolested The hiss and wriggle being rested ...”

“... Foreign Office colleague Donald Maclean. To round things out, we have The Storm Birds, Gordon Brook-Shepherd’s study of the Soviet agents who have spied for – or defected to – the West since 1945. Equally inevitably, the same themes, the same episodes criss-cross the four books. But for any armchair addict of the great game as practised since the ...”

“... oysters look. For you I’d stand that saying on its head: Your eyes have got no stomach. They can brook, Nay revel in, sights that would strike me dead And make me queasy even in a book. I’d like to call it sorcery or knavery But all too clearly it’s a kind of bravery. You’d need it, too, if you were here today, I think I might just mention at this ...”

“... of contemporary critics. Compounding with half will please nobody. From The Comic Sense of Henry James (1960) through A World Elsewhere (1966) and The Performing Self (1971) to Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing (1977), Poirier has pursued a consistent and inventive enquiry into literary language, and into the politics of literary language. ‘When a writer ...”

“... last two decades of his life. It was here that he composed his ambitious historical romances, The Brook Kerith (1916), which is concerned with St Paul’s discomfiture on discovering that Jesus had not, after all, died on the cross and ascended to heaven but was tending sheep in the Jordan Valley, and Héloïse and Abelard (1921), an attempt to re-create the ...”

“... civilisation ruined thanks to Francis Bacon, Rousseau, Hume, Comte, Marx, Bergson, William James, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Gramsci, Rowan Williams, Richard Dawkins, liberation theologians, Princess Diana, Professor Nutt, someone called Matthew Fox, Madonna, Cherie Blair – and Barack Obama. Nor is our gratitude due for her elucidation of why human ...”

“... by Sedgwick, both called Floating Columns: In the Bardo, were exhibited at Suny Stony Brook and the Cuny Graduate Center. She uses the Tibetan Buddhist term bardo, or the ‘space between states of being’, to signify the ‘painful bardo of dying’, which occupies the ‘space between contracting a terminal illness and death itself’. I did ...”

“... America of the late 19th century. In short, the reigning spirit here might be that of Henry James. This is a surprise. It is a long time, forty years or so, since Saul Bellow abandoned the Flaubertian tradition and decided to break out, to let rip (‘I am an American ...’). The result was an extraordinary gain in vigour. What other novelist in our ...”

“... Presbyterian goals, a tenet that has endured, with a more secular inflection, as Graham Walker and James Greer recognise, in Ulster Protestantism’s contractarian – and seemingly casual – commitment to the rule of law. The unionist fondness for Union Jacks does not preclude violent resistance to the British state when its policy conflicts with the ...”

“... winter of discontent. Still, it was a much better piece than was generally allowed (Clive James and Richard Ingrams making particular fools of themselves) but it wasn’t what viewers had come to expect from me and so was unfamiliar, or too unfamiliar anyway, a little unfamiliarity often an ingredient of success at any rate with critics, as it enables ...”

“... with replacing mixed farming with intensive monocultures is that it relies on artificial means. James Rebanks writes in English Pastoral: the farms with thousands of animals had more muck than their land could possibly accommodate, while the crop farms now had no animals, and thus no muck to fertilise plants, so were entirely reliant on ...”

“... Emerson wanted readers to stumble over the Latinism that punctuates this numbed passage. James Marcus tells us that it is a botanical term for the part of a plant that is easily shed as it develops. His zingy, empathetic portrait of Emerson grounds our understanding of his writing – perhaps even his wisdom – in his experience of loss. It often ...”

“... The Hazlitt of our time’, said the Manchester Guardian, announcing the death of James Agate in 1947. An extravagant compliment, but the famous theatre reviewer did have one or two of Hazlitt’s characteristics. Though his journalism now seems too pompous-frivolous even for the theatre world, his reports of actors’ performances are often vivid and persuasive: he was quite learned in his subject and could communicate his own enthusiasm, making drama seem important – more important, perhaps, than it seems to us today ...”

“... In his memoir, Burning the Days (1997), James Salter tells a story about an encounter between William Faulkner and an officer from the local airbase in Greenville, Mississippi in the early 1950s. They talk of the excitement of flying, and Faulkner drunkenly reminisces about his days as a pilot in France during the First World War ...”