“... recorded the gist of ‘Caedmon’s Hymn’ in Latin; the version that survives in Old English may well be a back translation. Even so, the semi-mythical cowherd became known as the first English poet and the father of English sacred song. His ‘Hymn’ has pride of place in anthologies of Old English poetry. For a while, anonymous biblical poems in Old ...”

“... fan complains that he can’t concentrate: the actress has left him ‘reeling’. The reader may be reeling too at this point – at the sheer freaky incongruity of it all. Sarah and Sigmund: the imp-brain runs amok. Odd counterfactuals begin to form in the cerebrum. What if the inventor of psychoanalysis had ‘seen’ Bernhardt: not just in the ...”

“... own son, John, who also became an adept fiddler, like his grandfather. Clare felt an affinity with Robert Burns, collected songs as Burns did, and during his asylum years wrote a number of songs in the Scottish vernacular. Clare says in his autobiography that both his parents were ‘illiterate to the last degree’. Concerned to dispel the myths, Bate points ...”

“... who died on the mountain in 1924, close to the summit, which he and his companion, Andrew Irvine, may or may not have reached. Since then there has been an unseemly rush to cash in on the discovery with at least six books, a poor film made by the BBC, several websites and the syndication of photographic rights across the ...”

“... poetry used regularly to be left out of Australian anthologies, but that is an old bad habit we may have grown out of by now. Mr James’s name attracts far more affection than odium, and he gets away with astounding things on his return visits. I have, by way of the tube, witnessed his telling a whole large roomful of sleek women journalists, in ...”

“... power of the raped and dying woman’. So the work is not as tightly composed as Donaldson may wish it to be – although this is not the defect he may fear it is. The parts of the book are unequal, since Lucretia has all the thunder (St ...”

“... might have brought him a bull of excommunication as a birthday gift. Even an improper noise may call forth uninvited guests, unfriendly critics: the explosive start of Inside Mr Enderby is a fart, succeeded by ghostly mutterings: PFFFRRRRUMMMP.   And a very happy New Year to you too, Mr ...”

“... heating; it survived all that the Beatles could do to it in the ‘Peacock Revolution’; and it may yet survive the attempts of the master tailors to price themselves out of existence. Chenoune finds himself repeatedly paying tribute to the English influence on men’s fashion. Successive waves of Anglomania swept France even during the Revolutionary ...”

“... Day’, a sort of diary of what Tom Nairn did and felt on the unforgettable rainy Thursday of 6 May 1999. It was the first polling day for the reconvened Scottish Parliament. As Nairn drove back from Fife, where he had gone to say goodbye to a dying friend, he passed through some shaggy badlands country and was reminded of Dunn’s Among bracken, in his ...”

“... were somewhat different. Unless one is knowledgeable about such technological history, one may be surprised, too, to find that Sassoon’s car did 50 miles to the gallon. Of somewhat wider historical interest is the fact – which everyone knows in general but which it is more difficult to imagine concretely – that one could then quite unremarkably ...”

“... training and instruction of youths and students in the arts and faculties ... that they may be the better assisted in the study of the liberal arts and the cultivation of virtue and religion’. R.B. McDowell and D.A. Webb have written the history of that bizarre institution, Trinity College, from 1592 to 1952, the year in which Provost McConnell ...”

“... or if it does, whether he is not asking himself if his instinctive personal reaction to a question may not be misguided or inadequate. Sometimes the message emerges from the dialogue itself, as the characters combine to build up a collective understanding of which each would have been incapable in isolation. None of this makes it possible to present Diderot as ...”

“... She is annoyed when her individual circumstances are taken as proof of structural inequality. She may think of herself as an outsider to a certain kind of feminism, to the marketing of ‘self-care’, to the relentless insistence on empowerment, transformation, healing and sharing. The thought of posting online with a hashtag repels her. She ...”

“... Hilliker, in 1958. In this new piece of work Ellroy offers his readers – and who knows what they may make of it? – a different kind of case history, one of compacted self-delusion, grandiosity and monstrous self-pity. Dutifully, I set to. I reread My Dark Places and once more exposed myself to the fanfaronade of his self-interrogation as he detailed the ...”

“... Sir Henry Wotton, sent a copy to James I, describing it as ‘the strangest piece of news (as I may justly call it)’ that he would ever have received ‘from any part of the world’. Most copies were probably sent over the Alps by Tommaso Baglioni, the book’s nominal publisher, or his boss, the excommunicated polemical printer Roberto Meietti, now in ...”