“... to settle for long in one place. Her restlessness meant, as her biographers Ruth First and Ann Scott point out, that she ‘lacked a constituency’. In spite of her record of friendships, she felt the pain of isolation, both personal and political. ‘Indeed the two were joined, for her sense of politics included the necessity for the individual to define ...”

“... in the chronicles of biological discovery, does not rank in glamour with the exploits of Captain Scott and Sir Edmund Hillary. Hydrozoa are commonly known as jellyfish, and Huxley seems to have devoted a lot of time in the 1840s to examining the interior workings of tapeworms (cestodes, or endoparasitic platyelmia). Hard to make a bestseller out of ...”

“... hardest to acquire. It was touch and go. He died in 1940, just before the British Empire. In 1953, Richard Usborne published a book called Clubland Heroes, which expanded some of the criticisms made of John Buchan in the Thirties: that he was snobbish, blimpish, mildly anti-semitic and a worshipper of worldly success. What infuriated his widow was not so much ...”

“... but resisted, the temptations that Lévi-Strauss is so caustic about, telling Sir Walter Scott that he would not render his travels more marvellous by introducing ‘circumstances which, however true, were of little or no moment, as they related solely to his own personal adventures and escapes’ – the very things which, for good or evil, Evelyn ...”

“... fine nights on deck with ‘certain agreeable samples of womankind’, singing songs and reading Scott aloud. Back in Cambridge for the Michaelmas term, Hallam lapsed into post-vacation dejection. ‘After helping to revolutionise kingdoms, one is still less inclined than before to trouble one’s head about scholarships, degree, and such gear.’ Low skies ...”

“... was forced out of the ministry for trading and promptly went bankrupt. As Ruth First and Ann Scott tell us in their 1980 biography of Schreiner, this catastrophe ‘scattered the children and marked the end of the family home’. It seems, on the face of it, as noteworthy as the maternal spanking. The Companion is similarly silent about Olive’s ...”

“... found the only extant item of his personal correspondence, a letter to him from his neighbour Richard Quiney; Malone who found what remains the only known copy of the 1594 first quarto of Venus and Adonis (and later bequeathed it, along with most of his remarkable library, to the Bodleian); Malone whose path-breaking edition of 1790, with its insistence ...”

“... There is actually another more modest library, neo-Gothic in style, and built by George Gilbert Scott in 1856. It’s over Exeter’s garden wall in the north-west corner of Radcliffe Square, but you can’t quite see that. This was where I worked, though it was possible if one was so inclined to get to study in the much more exclusive and architecturally ...”

“... defying body and convention to ‘soar like an eagle’ in the way of the blessed inebriate in Richard Thompson’s song ‘God Loves a Drunk’ (‘His shouts and his curses they are just hymns and praises/To kick-start his mind now and then’)? Timothy Neat writes not in order to leave his late friend in a heap on the floor, least of all the floor of ...”

“... read Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe (1682), with its delicate possible parallel between the dunce writer Richard Flecknoe and Charles II, but not Nero the Second. Charles can’t be twinned with Flecknoe as straightforwardly as George I with Nero but, as Keymer shows, it’s the non-straightforwardness of the parallel – the way it’s built up from detail to ...”

“... in defence of Tudor England are interesting, given their – sometimes exaggerated – support for Richard III against Henry VII in 1485 and the widespread support for the Pilgrimage of Grace, the massive northern revolt against Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries in 1536: dislike of Scotland trumped dislike of the Tudors. The recent coverage of the ...”

“... beautiful, quite unlike any previous art. Other St Martin’s sculptors included Phillip King, Tim Scott and William Tucker, all innovative artists who became tutors at St Martin’s immediately after completing their own studies. Thenceforward there was a line of sculptors at St Martins who changed, even further, the concept of what sculpture might be. Among ...”

“... educated outside the normal rut at Dartington, and then, after a spell at Gray’s Inn, by Richard Titmuss at the LSE, free therefore of the resentment, deference, fantasy and fear which drive a large part of the rest of the profession, he has an innocent energy in the face of what he once called ‘the chipped white cups of Dover’ which has carried ...”

“... only by way of nostalgic contrast to the ‘materialist’ 1950s. In The Uses of Literacy (1957), Richard Hoggart inveighed against the shallow Americanised world of the 1950s teenager, comparing London’s ‘harshly lighted milk bars’ to the communitarianism of prewar Leeds as he remembered it from his childhood. Hoggart was spinning a tale of moral ...”

“... till his arm ached, and then he flung him into a chair, gasping, cursing, and scarcely human. And Richard Chandos v. Boler, the Boche villain of Dornford Yates’s Cost Price:   ‘Look on your own face,’ I said; ‘for, by God, when you see it next, it won’t look the same.’   Then, as a man puts the weight, I put his face to the wall beside the ...”