“... with light sheaves of paper, grinning. ‘Keep busy outdoors, in charge of your own time,’ it read. ‘Ideal for students, housewives and pensioners.’ He showed me a day’s work from just after Christmas: three rounds, sorting and delivering 323 pieces of mail, weighing a total of 81.4 kilograms, to 279 addresses. Sandd claimed this should take six ...”

“... a sad and puzzled coda: ‘Forgive the zeal/That, too presumptuous, whisper’d better things/And read the book of destiny amiss.’ Anyhow, Priestley adored the poem, and read it to an admiring audience at the London Coffee House which included Boswell, on whose account of the struggle Barbauld had based her ...”

“... interviewers, was ‘like opening a gate … the minute I opened it and saw the photographs, and read the text, I knew there was going to be yield from it.’Heaney had already been drawn to write boggy things. In the delightful poem ‘Bogland’ in Door into the Dark (1969) he had eulogised the preservative genius of the land: ‘Butter sunk under/More ...”

“... man is just beginning to take conscious participation in some of his evolutionary formulations.’ Richard Buckminster Fuller, who liked to be called Bucky, was born in 1895 to a family of stubborn, bossy New England individualists. Even the Fuller family cow was ‘tyrannical’, Nathaniel Hawthorne once complained. (Hawthorne was a friend of Bucky’s ...”

“... When Richard Rorty died last year, the New York Times called him ‘one of the world’s most influential contemporary thinkers’. Few philosophers would accept this assessment. Rorty was widely read and admired by many, he had a good nose for a controversy and was impressive in oral debate ...”

“... 433 BCE – and even scholars are inclined to be matter of fact about what is at stake. For snakes read worms. No doubt the hybrid creatures struggling in the spaces left over from the worms’ turning are meant to signify a fight against the agents of decomposition. The bronze core of the coffin, and its hardwood beams and panels, and the twisted ropes all ...”

“... school in Pennsylvania, where he made friends with the son of Oscar Hammerstein, the lyricist for Richard Rodgers. (The young Sondheim went to see their pioneering show Oklahoma! when it opened in 1943.) Hammerstein recognised Sondheim’s talent, began to educate him in musical theatre and became a father-figure. It comes as a modest surprise now when ...”

“... a long battle between Tower Hamlets Council and the Smithsons’ admirers, who include Hadid and Richard Rogers, the estate is currently being demolished. Alison Smithson died in 1993. Her husband survived her, but she had always been the dominant partner and much of the cult status the Smithsons now enjoy is owed to her. With her dark matryoshka doll ...”

“... Western military technology and its bureaucratisation of death. That Fu Manchu, who seems to have read Mirbeau attentively, should devote so much time and effort to refining methods of torture is sure evidence, for Rohmer, of the ineradicable barbarism of the Chinese ‘mentality’. There’s one element of the Fu Manchu formula, however, which doesn’t ...”

“... autonomy, inner responsibility, moral obligation and so forth’, ‘deniers’ like Richard Rorty who were inclined to reduce talk of the true and the right to what we find it convenient to believe – were discomfited by his dazzle. But in fact he was a constructive man. Shooting an idea out of someone’s hand as soon as it came up, he would ...”

“... state’ has been extensively studied from a variety of angles, most recently in Richard Overy’s The Bombing War: Europe 1939-45, which includes an authoritative account of the evolution into doctrine of the belief that strategic bombing defined the purpose of the modern air force as an instrument capable of transforming warfare. Overy ...”

“... displays a happy balance between scholarship and readability. Its directness shows that Bartlett read Augustine in Latin (cur et mortui tanta possunt?) – the published translations are much wordier. Bartlett identifies the three essentials for a saint cult as ‘name, body, text’. Names might be confused and texts could be commissioned, but a body, or at ...”

“... to be more powerful than kings.’The cacophony of voices in McPhee’s book recalls the work of Richard Cobb; it shows a similar sensitivity to regional variation and delight in anarchic individualism. McPhee offsets popular devotion to the revolution with evidence of apathy, frustration and profanity. ‘Vive le roi! The republic can get fucked,’ one ...”

“... a Gurney concordance would be for ‘glow’, ‘shine’, ‘fire’, ‘sun’, ‘stars’.He read Keats and, to drown out the noise of the machine guns, played Bach and Elgar in his head. He set John Masefield’s ‘By a Bierside’ to music while sitting on a sandbag (the manuscript is stained with mud). He sent his poems to Marion Scott, along with ...”

“... just out of reach. Forbidden fruit hanging almost low enough to be plucked.I knew that I wanted to read Offbeat as soon as I saw that it contained a chapter dedicated to the history of the AA certificate, from which I learned, incidentally, that it was introduced in July 1970 and dropped in September 1982 to make way for the 15 certificate still in use ...”