“... publication, he was nominated for election as an associate of the Linnean Society. According to David Attenborough, Lear is ‘the finest bird artist there ever was’. His drawings were primarily intended to help scientists identify species, yet his birds are exhibitionists as well as exhibits, always more than an instance that confirms a rule. The same ...”

“... an advocate, at the Oxford Union, of the birch and stocks; Chris Huhne, later energy secretary in David Cameron’s cabinet; Jeremy Hunt, the current health secretary. Johnson liked teaching and had a taste for the rough and tumble. His great day was not as a young man who worried about apartheid, or a feisty libertarian outnumbered by big French Stalinists ...”

“... failed to respond to this compliment with any valuable acknowledgment, Thomson, Aaron Hill and David Mallet prepared satirical verses on unsatisfactory patrons to preface the second edition of ‘Winter’. Compton stepped in in time (with civility and 20 guineas), and Thomson judiciously persuaded his friends to tone down their verses, or at least to ...”

“... priest and doctor. Dr Rabelais, like Father Rabelais, comforts the afflicted. A Platonising bishop held that the surname Rabelais, by mystical Hebrew etymology, truly means ‘Prince of Mockers’. In 1818 Hazlitt ended his introductory lecture ‘On the English Comic Writers’ not with Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Congreve, Sterne or Garrick but with ...”

“... Guided at times by Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony, Eugene Genovese, Eric Foner and David Brion Davis conceived slavery as a mode of organising labour, as well as a system of racial domination. This led to the recognition that advocates of ‘free labour’ had economic as well as humanitarian reasons for opposing slavery, and that the Northern ...”

“... responsible for Julian’s fondness for country squirely pursuits. There’s a good description by David Garnett of Julian beagling at Cambridge: he was ‘far bigger, noisier and more raggedly dressed than any of his companions … bursting with happy excitement … Late in the afternoon Julian turned up with his ragged clothes torn to tatters, which flapped ...”

“... and he was one of the poets and actors known as the Generación del 27 – the first meeting was held in Seville in 1927. Hugh said he would pull out some books from his shelves; we would talk about all of that when we next met. When would that be? I thought for a second. Lunch on Sunday? When we said goodbye, Hugh would have rung my mother upstairs to tell ...”

“... the death and capture of many more Americans, as well as endangering the lives of those already held captive’. The message was devastating to Nixon’s political goals. Massive bombing of North Vietnam, enough to keep the Communists from overrunning Saigon until after the American election, was the only way Nixon would be able to sell what he was calling ...”

“... Emperors of late years have very much enlarged their dominions,’ yet the ‘colonies’ were held ‘by force’ and subject to extortion. The people lived cold, dark, hyperborean lives similar to those endured by the Scots. Their cabins were made out of tree trunks, with moss stuffed into the cracks. ‘Every house hath a pair of stairs that lead up ...”

“... about maintaining a lead over his competitors – securing unique access to particular collections held in private hands, for instance, and taking on editorial commissions which would effectively remove archival material from wider access until he had brought them to publication. He was, one of his students remarked, ‘fiercely competitive, though he usually ...”

“... a journalistic sinecure in the most reactionary Prussian government of the century (a position he held for the next twenty years). Tallhover’s surveillance of Theodor Fontane is not recorded in Schädlich’s novel; and in any case, Grass’s Hoftaller is a far jollier figure, who intervenes fully as much to protect the sometimes naive Fonty as he does to ...”

“... Rochester’s poems was made by Vivian de Sola Pinto for Routledge and Kegan Paul in 1953. In 1968 David Vieth produced an edition of 76 poems plus eight more listed as ‘Possibly by Rochester’; 75 of his attributions and usually his choices of copy-text were accepted by Keith Walker for his edition for Blackwell’s in 1984; to the 75 Walker added six new ...”

“... do I think ...’ Much of what critics like Louis Menand (in the New York Review of Books) and David Denby (in the New Yorker) have said about Eyes Wide Shut is true. The timing is terrible, the dialogue is wooden and Tom Cruise is worse than you can imagine any reasonably competent actor could be. He has only one gesture – a sketch of a wave of the ...”

“... The archives in Portbou and neighbouring Figueres are full of oddities, carefully laid out in David Mauas’s documentary film Who Killed Walter Benjamin? (2005). They have opened the field for speculative interest about Benjamin’s death. In 2001 Stephen Schwartz, a Trotskyist-turned-Sufist who has always seen the hidden hand of the evil ...”

“... it was another life, or the same life another time, was immaterial. Terror, for the most part held at bay during the hours of daylight by sheer forgetfulness, settled in as the daily routine wound down, and I had said my prayers and been settled into bed. Physically alone at last, I would be caught unawares by the sudden sight, through the net ...”