“... Bridget Jones. Except that Self-Help also now reads like a self-consciously historical document, a John Dos Passos-like collage. As well as simply telling stories about young women working and dreaming in 1980s Manhattan etc etc, Moore’s form and language pastiche the very material of which such dreams are made: stories address the reader (‘How to Be an ...”

“... are more likely to occur. (Two modern editions of the Requiem – those of David Wulstan and Bruno Turner – try to correct the offending octaves in the Benedictus but in doing so introduce two sets of consecutive fifths. It would have been better to leave Victoria with his momentary slip, as Rees does in his new online edition of the entire work.) The first ...”

“... one, where he met Edward Bawden. The two shared a love of neglected landscape watercolourists – John Sell Cotman, Alexander Cozens, Francis Towne and Samuel Palmer; they made a pilgrimage to Palmer’s Shoreham in 1926. Paul Nash, who taught them at the RCA, described their cohort as ‘an outbreak of talent’ and helped Ravilious and Bawden to find work ...”

“... in the rock-leaved Bible of geology’. Those were the words of the pioneering geologist John Wesley Powell, who led the first expedition through the Grand Canyon in 1873. Thomas Moran, an experienced painter from Philadelphia, travelled with Powell, and had been to Wyoming and Montana with the US Geological and Geographical Survey two years ...”

“... charter flight with a granddaughter. He was fond of the arts, and in his last years visited the Turner exhibition at Burlington House eight times, and the Chinese exhibition and the Treasures of Tutankhamun (that unprecedented queue-creating occasion) almost as often. Such was his habitual impatience to get into the National Gallery that he regularly ...”

“... The Darwin scholar, John Greene, once summarised the Darwinian revolution as the triumph of a dynamic and non-teleological structuring of nature over static, teological systems: the triumph of chance and change over design and permanence, the triumph of objectivity in the life sciences, of secularism and naturalism over clericalism and the supernatural ...”

“... was the only surviving portion. In 2002, Worden identified the deist and republican John Toland as the person most likely to have transformed ‘Ludlow, the builder of a godly commonwealth’ of the 1650s into ‘Ludlow, the radical Whig or “real Whig”’ of the 1690s.This enduring deception would appeal to Robert Harris, whose Selling ...”

“... another, but his recent novels are more concerned with reconciliation. In Atonement (2001), Robbie Turner – a 1930s Cambridge English graduate who has decided that Eng. Lit. isn’t everything, ‘whatever Dr Leavis said in his lectures’ – plans to go to medical school. He imagines becoming someone who embodies the best of both traditions, literary and ...”

“... who was just a year old. She may, or may not, have had six other children who died in infancy. John Chapple is punctilious about what he calls ‘the knotty entrails of oaken facts’, and will not pretend to know what he cannot prove. The pathos of Mrs Stevenson’s faded existence is not lost on him, and he does what he can for her ...”

“... together by the rich Renaissance epigraphs, from Shakespeare, Burton, Spenser, and Dekker, William Turner and Pierre Erondell, Drayton and Sidney, which like the buildings of the university town marshal a reader’s progress and whisper, in their proportions and through their gargoyles, of older traditions than our own, and less happy endings than the reader ...”

“... scattered collections – made by Marion Scott, the Gurney family, Ivor’s Gloucester friend John Haines, Vaughan Williams and others – into a central archive. The process continued after Finzi’s death in 1956. Neither Gurney nor Scott had bothered much about dates and the habit of confusion grew by amalgamation. Blunden, returning manuscripts ...”

“... without representation’ became a political demand for liberty, changed everything. Major John Cartwright (who was later to advise the Manchester radicals) and Thomas Paine were influenced by the American programme in their arguments for domestic reform, Take Your Choice! and Common Sense. Yet it was the French Revolution that made the working classes ...”

“... compellingly ghastly ‘Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way’, a sort of homage to John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse (1968) only denser and even more postmodernly whorled: ‘For whom is the Funhouse a house? … For Tom Sternberg, the Funhouse is less a place of fear and confusion than (grimace) an idea, an ever-distant telos his arrival at ...”

“... emails, is strikingly similar to the message dropped through the letterboxes of Pepys Road in John Lanchester’s novel Capital – ‘We Want What You Have’.) Lasdun’s parents were Jews who converted to the C of E, and Nasreen’s communications quickly became virulently anti-semitic: ‘Do you have to be the stereotype of a Jew, James?’; ‘I ...”

“... moved in the opposite direction. In After ‘The Open Society’, Jeremy Shearmur and Piers Norris Turner have collected a range of his published and unpublished essays, letters and lectures that tell the story of this transformation. To the picture Popper presented of himself in his autobiography Unended Quest (1976), this volume adds a map of his ...”