“... in philosophy. He was a friend of Coleridge, and was one of the first people in Britain to read Kant. Kant had written about pure space as a realisation of geometry: it was Hamilton’s attempt to construct a corresponding algebra of pure time that led him eventually to quaternions. Professor Hankins apparently accepts Hamilton’s own assertion that ...”

“... rich and comfortable middle-class family in Baltimore. She went to high-society schools, where she read Kipling to her boyfriends. She married a young Air Force officer, and became, in her twenties, an important personality in Washington society. Her main male friend outside her collapsing marriage was the Ambassador in Washington of the new Fascist regime in ...”

“... R.H. Robins; and investigate the cultural significance of dictionaries, whether in education (Peter Strevens on Learner’s Dictionaries), in the celebration of a national consciousness (Dr Ramson), in the geographical diffusion of a vocabulary (the admirable Frederic Cassidy on the Dictionary of American Regional English), or in the historical tradition ...”

“... was clearly the fancied candidate for Sunday Times serialisation. Maxwell will hardly care to read that the London Daily News failed for a reason nobody dared tell him, ‘because of its parentage’, or that the portents for his ‘last dash for glory’ are both favourable and ominous. Which dash for glory would that be? He is capable of a good many ...”

“... grandparents in the wicked town of Maidenhead. I didn’t know it was wicked until later when I read the novels of Graham Greene and Patrick Hamilton. My aunt certainly wasn’t wicked. When she stepped out of the house she would usually go, not down into the town itself, but in the other direction up to what were called ‘the fields’ and on to ...”

“... In his letters he spoke copiously and freely to a great many correspondents. It is hard to read the dozens of amorous effusions here quoted without some distaste. The language of love is tediously extravagant, and often deserves the criticism Monk applies to Russell’s attempts at imaginative writing: ‘weak and affected’. Moreover, though he ...”

“... comedy without ever having much fun herself. Rather than a Modesty Blaise in the manner of Sir Peter Lely, a swaggering hedonist from the swinging 1660s, this is an Aphra for the soberly whiggish Nineties. The depressing thing is that Todd is often thoroughly convincing. On Behn’s reputation as a spy, for example, despite the publisher’s promise of ...”

“... sit in front of the television and watch Felicity Kendal in The Good Life. It contains people who read Country Living and worry about overpopulation and resource depletion and their pension funds and the way works of art are leaving Britain, but who don’t worry about the connection between these five things. It contains naturopaths and computer ...”

“... was, deliberately insulated from the highly-charged milieux of the Age of Steam, Soap and Steel. Peter Harman’s new book tries to demonstrate how much metaphysics mattered in the everyday labours of Victorian Britain’s greatest mathematical physicist. Comparisons are odious, but league-tables are another feature of the public life of contemporary ...”

“... that Aeschylus’ rival Phrynichus was particularly noted for his choreographies, or learn from Peter Wilson in Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy that the shawm (aulos) which always accompanied a performance came in various shapes and sizes depending on the musical context (the ‘wedding shawm’, for example, consisted of one ‘male’ and one ...”

“... all of Scholem’s scholarly apparatus, which has the advantage of making his book easier to read, but the disadvantage that we don’t know what the sources are for various elements in the story. In Scholem’s telling, the development of the great messianic movement within the Ottoman Empire took place without any influence from the broader Christian ...”

“... or abandoned to bewail their fate on a stage constructed out of gallstones and other body casts. Peter the Great bought the lot for the huge sum of 30,000 Dutch guilders in 1717, and had them shipped to Russia. Both Fragonard and Ruysch were decidedly odd characters, brooders who took their discipline to a pitch well beyond the necessary degree of scientific ...”

“... came and went, the Branson book stayed, to be taken up by the decreasing remainder as a favourite read. Surely it must have been the devious, miscalculating and ultimately naive Nick who brought it into the house? Nick got sussed by the public and eventually his fellow inmates. Is the same thing going to happen to Richard Branson? He who lives by public ...”

“... was supposedly William Maginn, who retaliated for Bulwer-Lytton’s caricature of him as Peter MacGrawler in Paul Clifford by using his position as editor of Fraser’s Magazine to publish a series of wounding articles about Bulwer-Lytton’s novels. ‘Illustrious Vidocq’, as Bulwer-Lytton called him, was the inspiration for the ambivalent ...”

“... the audience could boo) to the introduction of the authorial programme note and press interview (read in respectful silence). The greatest change of the Eighties and Nineties in the theatre – as in British culture as a whole – has been a shift of power from the producer to the consumer: it’s no surprise that audiences have flocked back to a playwright ...”