“... shall I get out of this labyrinth?’ Or perhaps invented by an imitator of Borges, someone more dedicated to the explicit and the theatrical – a Borges deeply involved with the European Romantics. Bolivar is almost too much of a good thing for a novelist, and Garcia Marquez never quite decides what to do with him. He avoids the deadpan ironies of his ...”

“... has accordingly been gaining ground. Most significant, in Parliamentary by-elections it has polled more votes than either the Conservative or Labour Parties. There is no over-publicised Alliance bandwagon, as in the winter of 1981-2, but there is a new solidity and stability to the support which it can now mobilise. The obvious conclusion is that the Alliance ...”

“... Street crash, witnesses the rise of Nazism in Berlin (where he attends parties with Fritz Lang and Thomas Mann), and arrives in Hollywood just in time to fall foul of McCarthyism. Any Human Heart (2002) is narrated by Logan Mountstuart, an English author who knocks about Oxford and London with the likes of Cyril Connolly and Henry Green, reports on the Spanish ...”

“... form the letter g. Other letters followed, until by the end of the week I was unable to produce more than a scrawl. Not even a treasured fountain pen could save it. It all became, as Anne Carson on behalf of us Parkinsonians says, ugly.* What happened next was entirely unexceptional. In Oxford, where I had become a visiting professor, the neurologist, a ...”

“... Bartholomeus Breenbergh, to contemporary British artists such as Amelia Long, Paul Sandby and Thomas Gainsborough, a selection of which are on display. His admiration for Claude Lorrain led him to acquire more than 270 of Lorrain’s landscape drawings, seven of which are included in the show.Of particular interest ...”

“... polymers’. She enjoys the ‘cool carpe diem of secret transgression’. Her smoking is all the more subversive, it turns out, because her father treated patients with emphysema. Even Thomas Bodger, a hapless 19th-century scientist who has promised the newly chartered Royal Meteorological Society ‘an answer to Helm’s ...”

“... read except [Sarah] herself; if I had thought so, I give you my word, I shou’d have been much more reserved both in that and in the other letters I wrote to her … I shall write to her for the future as I preach to my Congregation, good wholesome serious sound matter, such as may please the eye of a watchful Parent. Private letters were often read aloud ...”

“... Rotherhithe’. He stalked twilight zones, dowsing for echoes of Conan Doyle, Arthur Machen and Thomas De Quincey. We are commuters, he wrote, ‘struck by a quarantine whose extent escapes our measuring instruments’. After wartime displacement to Bordeaux, and the horrors of typhoid, he returned to a shuttered Antwerp, drained, estranged from ...”

“... Tenth also showed up at various times. The First and the Ninth came back at season’s end, while Thomas Hampson sang the complete Mahler songs. Each of the major works, then, was performed at least once, and it wasn’t even an anniversary year. Beethoven’s little things, by contrast, received, by my count, seven performances – by the Philharmonic and by ...”

“... say republican, education at Christ’s Hospital in the City of London, where he was a friend of Thomas Barnes, a future editor of the Times, and a younger contemporary of Lamb and Coleridge. John and Leigh Hunt brought a new idealism to English journalism when they launched the Examiner in 1808. At a time when most polite journals were still tied to the ...”

“... Henry Crawford’s comment in Mansfield Park is a reminder that ‘Shakespeare’ is more than an individual writer: ‘it’ is an institution, a body of texts whose study, from O-level to the highest reaches of academia, is a means of legitimating social advancement and whose production on the stage and on television makes a powerful ...”

“... Street Runners. Fielding the novelist was a tolerant chap who found small infringements of the law more comic than reprehensible. He thought poverty was indeed a cause of crime, and liked to give first-time offenders a second chance. He was the exact opposite of Fielding the magistrate, who set out his views on crime in An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late ...”

“... writing, had himself rigorously and regularly and most redundantly bled, and refrained from eating more than would keep a starving man alive. Keats had trained in surgery, treated consumptive patients and nursed first his mother during the consumption that killed her and then his brother Tom. Though not well understood or treatable, the symptoms of what we ...”

“... urban haunt, was himself a major contributor to the Past and Present series. His new book is a more than worthy member of the illustrious company it seeks to keep. Sustained by a mellifluous style, meticulous scholarship, a powerful historical imagination and profound human sympathy, it is, if not definitive, then at least as good a book as one can readily ...”

“... Freud returning to his ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’ (1895) with a new idiom, but no more neurology, on offer. Anna Freud makes no objection to the late system, though she skirts warily round parts of it – describing the death instinct, for instance, without relish. Where some strain shows is with Femininity’: yet the editor’s faith is such ...”