“... 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 ...”

“... its ironic blending of high and low, its whispered implication that things might be different. May not the Linnin of a Tiburn slave, More honour then a mighty Monarke have? That though he dyed a Traytor most disloyall, His Shirt may be transform’d to Paper royall. And may not dirty ...”

“... Whatever may be the judgment of time on the intrinsic value of Renan’s contribution to the sum of knowledge, he can never lose his place among the few great names in the history of letters.’ This assessment from the 1901 edition of Chambers’s Encyclopedia, equally striking today for its confidence and its remoteness, summarises the conventional wisdom at the beginning of the 20th century ...”

“... its mast’ring power, I scarce can fathom, thou wilt never know;My lighter passions into rhythm may glow;This is forever voiceless. Could the flowerOpen its petall’d thought, and praise the dowerOf sunlight, or the fresh gift of the dew,The bounteous air that daily round it blew,Blessing unweariedly in sun and shower,Methinks would miss its ...”

“... the Irish are pleased to call the confluence of two little streams, pompously or poetically as you may please to decide, I think more has been made of it than either the waters or their meeting deserve.’ This is the English travel writer John Barrow writing of the Vale of Avoca in 1835. Like him, I find it hard to decide on the register of the phrase, so ...”

“... number of fratricidal horrors, of pointing a dreadful finger at the United States. Beware! You too may one day poke your cellphone through the curtains to film shaky clips of fires and explosions on the horizon of your suburb, it may be your feet crunching on the bloodied glass of a bombed café, it ...”

“... of great works this is surely true. But links between early and later writing by an artist may be allowed to illuminate both. There is one very early and imperfect play by Shakespeare which may throw surprising light on the absolutely achieved and mature Hamlet, not as a source, but as in itself powered by a ...”