“... rather perfunctory and anecdotal. It is a pity, too, that little of their accompanying text can be read here, since Arbus considered herself in part a writer, and her photo-essays take on a whimsical humour from her faux-naif prose and deadpan captions that is not otherwise apparent. None of these undoubted handicaps can excuse the bad writing and shoddy ...”

“... with that ‘poet, playwright, critic, editor and publisher’, T.S. Eliot (whose later life, Richard Ellmann informs us, ‘became rather stately’): ‘I did not know death had undone so many.’ When originally conceived, Lee observed that ‘national biography must be prepared to satisfy the commemorative instinct of all sections of the ...”

“... biographers, these two books are emphatically the fruits of his own immense labours. He has read everything that has been published on the subject; he has talked to everyone remotely connected with Elgar, including his daughter Carice, who did not die until 1970; and he has made unprecedentedly full use of the rich Elgar archives at Broadheath and in ...”

“... of the disease, as presented by Bell and referred to by Orbach: a first medical sighting by Richard Morton and described in his Treatise on Consumption of 1687, Naudeau’s account of a fatal case of self-starvation in 1789, in which the victim’s mother was clearly implicated; William Gull’s and Charles Lasegue’s independent recognition of ...”

“... from Marian England and toiling reluctantly as a corrector in Basel, John Foxe said he had never read anything ‘less pleasant, more choppy or more rebarbative’ than Stephen Gardiner’s prose (‘he spirals off so wildly that he needs a Sibyl rather than a translator’); Balthasar Moretus of the Plantin company complained that one author’s ...”

“... attic. The collapse of the New Deal coalition opened another door as well. Through it walked Richard Nixon. Stein examines the strategy that aimed at making the Republicans the party of the white working class. It was an audacious political move that took advantage of the racial, nationalist, religious and patriarchal resentments and fears unleashed by ...”

“... after the jury had left their places and the public gallery had been cleared. Later still, when I read more about trees I got the point that it was bad taste, and environmentally incorrect, to anthropomorphise a species or a large singleton in the way I’ve just done. We were city people when we moved to the country and I still am. I’d sooner pull Francis ...”

“... in which he whimsically styled himself Yūnus Ūksfurdī, or Oxford Jones. The Grammar was widely read for its opulent verse translations (‘the sense aches at them’, Elizabeth Montagu wrote), but Jones was careful to make the poetry accessible to mainstream neoclassical taste. Hāfiz was not only exotic and strange but ‘the Anacreon of Persia’; in ...”

“... have taken a little getting used to: He gave me his card. ‘The Venerable Thupten Ngodub’, it read, ‘Medium of the state oracle of Tibet’. There was a phone number, too. Thupten Ngodub was a young monk with a face of almost theatrical calm and a soft, deep voice. As well as being the medium of the state oracle, he was celebrated as a cartoonist: his ...”

“... the tongue: Jean-Noël Vuarnet, Sylviane Agacinski, Jim West, Mary McCarthy, Gregory Mazurovsky, Richard Foreman, Kate Manheim, Louis and Zuka Mittelberg, Bruno Marcenac, Michel Loriod, Maurice Roche), he now can see that all the high-flown references he had barely understood – to Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan – were no more than intellectualising ...”

“... in the place of the denominations of Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter’. The Proclamation read from the steps of the General Post Office in Sackville Street (now O’Connell Street) by Patrick Pearse gave full expression to these sentiments, adumbrating a series of principles that blended romantic nationalism with the political ideals of the ...”

“... after the conquest was painful to relate. In 1855, the philologist and later archbishop of Dublin Richard Chenevix Trench frightened an audience of schoolboys with the story of the deliberate perversion of the language by the French: he accused them of drawing ‘a secret satisfaction, a conscious sense of superiority, in thus stripping the language of its ...”

“... of the colleges couldn’t exist: without their work, as he says, ‘the hard readers could not read, nor the high thinkers live.’ He comes to recognise, in a word, that the origin of culture is labour. This is true etymologically as well. One of the original meanings of the word culture is the tending of natural growth, which is to say agriculture, and a ...”

“... with ways of making sense of the world around me.’ There were other formative influences. He read widely, and quickly absorbed the work of Léopold Senghor, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks and Amiri Baraka, whose poetry drew on vernacular speech patterns and the rhythms of jazz and blues. Through New Beacon Books, a radical bookshop and publisher in ...”

“... 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 ...”