“... like this give rhetoric a good name. In two senses at least, they heighten proficiency in the craft of language. First, they enable us to compose more skilfully, by making us more sensitive to what composition involves; let instinct work as it will, it is never amiss to know consciously how every word comes on to the page. Second, we begin to see what is ...”

“... likely to be a reference to Leopardi’s ‘Scherzo’ (where ‘la lima’ represents the poetic craft he upbraids his contemporaries for not using) than to the stone-grinders in Ecclesiastes which is Arrowsmith’s guess, documented again here. Joseph Brodsky once remarked of Andrei Platonov: ‘To talk about his pedigree, trying to fit him into this or ...”

“... Malcolm Yorke says more about ‘excesses of amorous nature’ than friends and disciples do (like Robert Speaight, whose biography came out in 1966), in whose hands his reputation has largely rested. The very presence of a woman was a temptation and incitement: he had Ayatollah-like ideas about women’s clothing – perhaps a reflection of his ...”

“... 14th century; the Van Eycks had forebears and colleagues involved in this production line, such as Robert Campin, who also embraced oil paint. Captivated by pictorial exports from Siena, Flemings were now keen to commission works that stood halfway between the public arrays of stone-carved saints and the little pictures in books meant for private enjoyment ...”

“... Ploughing through these packed and not always fascinating columns may tell us as much about the craft, if that is the right word, of highbrow reviewing as it does about Eliot. On the English side one notices a steady reduction in pomposity, signalled by the disappearance of the reviewer’s plural first-person pronoun – a harmless convention that can be ...”

“... aspects … And in short, whereas he had thought to surpass in this work all the paintings in this craft, he scarcely reached the level of his own works executed in times past. Binet reproduces this passage, imagining it appearing in a letter Vasari sent to Michelangelo on 7 January 1557. It appears in Perspectives more or less verbatim, though slightly ...”

“... important posts but withdrew from consideration – the names would include Zbigniew Brzezinski, Robert Malley, Rashid Khalidi and the anti-war Republican senator Chuck Hagel, whose leaked note to George W. Bush may have saved the US from a war with Iran in 2007. If one made it a list of incidents as well as persons, one would have to count the snub to Jimmy ...”

“... colophon to the 16th-century Maitland Folio manuscript copy of Dunbar’s ‘To speik of science, craft, or sapience’, a poem which criticises learning detached from its moral application, states: ‘Quod Dumbar at Oxinfurde’. Did Dunbar go to Oxford during the 1501 trip? It is unlikely. The stream of Scots studying at Oxford seems pretty well to have ...”

“... while levying heavy tariffs to protect landowners’ profits. Liberals, and liberal Tories like Robert Peel, realised that slimming the state allowed them to defend it better against this radical critique. After the 2008 financial crisis, the Conservative political strategy of ‘austerity’ meant that Labour could be identified as irresponsible high ...”

“... keep it there: it served only as a depot, all the work, admittedly tricky, being done in smaller craft nominally under his orders. He did not seem to care about this, and there was reason to doubt whether his professional skill was anything like equal to his mad self-confidence. On one occasion a boom defence vessel was for some reason detached and sent to ...”

“... creating unity; only its content was different. Two of Durkheim’s followers, the anthropologists Robert Hertz and Arnold Van Gennep, provide Ben-Amos with the narrative for the ‘Culture’ section. Hertz argued that the death of an individual was the death of a social being and thus a blow to the social order. The community healed this wound by means of ...”

“... a flannelette nightie. Did that give licence to the next day’s BBC Book Programme, opened by Robert Robinson on the proposition that ‘the judges made the wrong choice’? A ‘favourite aunt’, ‘a jam-making grandmother’, ‘Pooterish’, ‘distrait’: this is the sort of thing people wrote about the figure Fitzgerald presented, finding a ...”

“... to nearer that of the real one, and cutting ‘futility’ from his title. ‘She was the largest craft afloat and the greatest of the works of men,’ his book begins. Hubris was waiting in the wings: ‘The steamship Titan was considered practically unsinkable.’ She was commanded by officers who ‘were not only seamen but scientists’; ‘she was a ...”

“... I wonder what you think of these?’Tolkien wrote many letters to his Catholic correspondents, Robert Murray, a Jesuit priest, and Peter Hastings, who owned a religious bookshop in Oxford, attempting to prove that this fake universe he had constructed was neither heretical nor blasphemous but entirely harmonious with orthodox theology. Where had orcs come ...”

“... the rushed observations of Andrew Marr. An academic industry has flourished. Now both Weight and Robert Colls have written requiems for the old Britishness which are also ruminations on a new, more democratic England. Britannia, for so long a proud Amazon, armoured and helmeted, repulsing European foes and civilising barbarians is, these days, according to ...”