“... he may have been dyslexic, and he was certainly an abnormally bad speller all his life; but he read voraciously, mostly adventure stories, and seems to have enjoyed a rich fantasy life. An unhappy school career, punctuated by expulsion from Dulwich College, ended when he turned 16 and was sent to Germany to learn the wine trade. He was much happier ...”

“... to the left of the headword. Murray’s successors William Craigie and Charles Onions tussled over whether to maintain this practice. Proofs of the Supplement dated 11 September 1929 retain Murray’s so-called tramlines; in the next proofs, dated 2 July 1930, they are gone. Between these dates, Onions joined the BBC Advisory Committee on Spoken English, where he became acutely aware of the prejudices that led some people to stigmatise new or imported terms; tramlines, he felt, didn’t help ...”

“... weren’t very good on the subject of matter. Aquinas believed in the soul, as Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins do not; but one reason he did so was because he thought it yielded the richest possible understanding of the lump of matter known as the body. As Wittgenstein once remarked: if you want an image of the soul, look at the body. The soul for Thomas ...”

“... In 1997 I went to hear Ian McEwan read from his latest novel, Enduring Love, at a café in a deconsecrated church in Oxford. The passage he chose was the now famous opening chapter, with its vivid and terrible account of a freak ballooning accident in the Chilterns. Much of the figurative vocabulary is drawn from a mathematical or scientific lexicon – ratio, magnitude, geometry, force, angles, equilibrium, gradient, equation, logarithmic complexity, fraction, variable – and at one point the narrator describes ‘the prior moment’ in the following terms: The convergence of six figures in a flat green space has a comforting geometry from the buzzard’s perspective, the knowable, limited plane of the snooker table ...”

“... here, just as those of us who can remember pre-decimal days still, I think, automatically read off the records’ figures for money in English, so ‘vj d’ would be converted into ‘sixpence’ without any conscious translation. Even a single word could be macaronic: the hall screens appear in one Cambridge record as leskreneum, a French article ...”

“... a more permanent exhibit: two earthenware jars. The jars are old and empty now, but you can still read their labels. ‘Sennae P.V.’ one says, ‘Pimento’ the other. Senna is made from the plant Cassia acutifolia which, when swallowed, accelerates the squeezing action of your gut (peristalsis). Your intestine will do all it can to get rid of the stuff ...”

“... Phoenix’s death in the first story in Palo Alto. He wrote a poem after Ledger died, which he read at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. And he got his big break by playing Dean, in an otherwise mediocre, made-for-cable biopic from 2001, memorable for nothing but the way Franco conveys Dean’s mischievousness along with his vulnerability and anger. That ...”

“... history. Most striking was the impetus given to the careers of black authors: Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison were given their first chance by the FWP. Its ambition was to create – or rather to discover – a great American epic in the acts and words of ordinary men and women: to draw from the disregarded speech and customs of the ...”

“... what he meant, and that he had a Meaning, in this or that Place. And thus every-one was taught to read with his Eyes. The image of Georgian England that still prevails today, some commentators argue, is Georgian England as Pope saw it. The beliefs that inform Pope’s works, and The Dunciad in particular – that the advent of a literary marketplace was ...”

“... offers detailed information about life at Winchester, where Empson’s companions included Richard Crossman, William Hayter, John Sparrow and other future grandees. It was, as he later remarked, ‘a ripping education’, a first-class ticket for life. The next stop was Cambridge, by means of a scholarship to Magdalene. At this optimum moment of ...”

“... at this time. What does link them, inside their luxuriant variety? The most austere among them, Richard Long, makes his works by walking, shuffling, treading. Many of them have probably been seen only by his camera. He fashioned a circle in the gibber-desert of the Hoggar region of the Sahara by clearing the gravel and shingle, leaving the dusty sand. He ...”

“... biggest of the changes he introduced to aid prisoner rehabilitation: inmates were encouraged to read and write. For Herman Spector, the prison’s librarian, the programme became a pet project: in 1957, when 18 per cent of the American public used a library, Spector produced a report to show that 90 per cent of San Quentin’s prisoners were borrowing ...”

“... into more than half its carrier’s offspring, will spread. These genes are not merely selfish in Richard Dawkins’s sense of being selected to out-compete different versions of themselves in the population: they are ruthless because, as in the case of Medea, they can spread even though their effects are strongly detrimental to the evolutionary interests of ...”

“... and by 1953 had established a reputation as a biographer. Two volumes on the life of Richard Monckton-Milnes, the late Georgian politician and socialite, were followed by a life of Monckton-Milnes’s son, Lord Crewe. The latter was the quid pro quo for access to the archives and was, Pope-Hennessy admitted, ‘less than inspired’. Its ...”

“... of the Sierra Maestra. It was also the place where Castro, who worshipped Martí’s verses and read Gabriel García Márquez’s first drafts, wrote his own poetry. In the early years he still had to explain his revolution to the world – and to himself – and to defend its shifting agenda against a relentless counter-narrative spun out of ...”