“... chemistry you missed. It’s the people cringing from their scientific illiteracy who buy Stephen Hawking books they can’t read, as if having them on the shelf will make the knowledge rub off; they snap up tracts on atheism, too, to show that if they’re ignorant they’re at least rational. But still, our understanding of the mechanisms of the ...”

“... let alone even the most influential works of criticism. As the founding father of New Historicism, Stephen Greenblatt made his professional reputation with Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980); but it was Will in the World (2004), his biographical account of ‘How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare’ that won him a huge advance. The established facts of ...”

“... Club, precursor of International Pen, but finds its literary milieu ‘alarmingly refined’ (Stephen Spender lectures on Poetic Drama, ‘loathing the suburbs’). She gives up the Daily Mail and starts reading the New Statesman. In 1936 her father dies unexpectedly. At 26 Jean has £300 a year, rent from the family home, and a portfolio of stocks and ...”

“... and theoretician of constitutional monarchy, but his liberalism is not so easily categorised, as Stephen Holmes noted in his fine Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism. It was, not simply a vision of the laissez-faire state guaranteeing the French bourgeoisie the right to get rich – as François Guizot was famously to propose during the ...”

“... into fugues of inspired counter-terror, then moving on. A suspicion lingers in the scorch marks that Home’s major project is Stewart Home: keeping his intelligence alive, gelling his retaliation in first. Home’s The Art Strike Papers are the ones you’ll find in Compendium Bookshop. The man who composes the post-humous testament controls ...”

“... of it. A toilet innocent of Harpic, a sideboard barren of Pledge, the New York set-up on St Marks Place was not an apartment for the fastidious. Those who are not as other men are often like a place just so, and the wonder is that none of the visiting bits of fluff didn’t nip round and do a spot of postcoital dusting. One who did lend a hand, though ...”

“... is occasioning a good deal of misguided and perplexed academic literary criticism. He aptly quotes Stephen Booth’s objection to those commentators who have indulged ‘a not wholly explicable fancy that in Hamlet we behold the frustrated and inarticulate Shakespeare furiously wagging his tail in an effort to tell us something’, but his own study takes its ...”

“... Those who were not inclined to dismiss such symptoms as (merely) psychosomatic or as telltale marks of the fake pioneered the concept of the ‘syndrome’ and formulated intermediate explanatory categories like neuralgia, functional disorder or chronic pain without lesion. Rey structures her inquiry around the exchanges between biomedical scientists and ...”

“... he writes. His book hovers over the hills and waterways of Scotland, staring down at the rutted marks of former glaciers and the footprints of deer, but all the while there are questions whispered under his breath: do I belong here? Is Scotland authentic? And most stirring of all: when was Scotland? The first of his journeys is to mid-Argyll, the place ...”

“... What​ became of his face? In his memorial address Stephen Spender, who had known Auden since they were undergraduates, contrasted the young man, Nordic and brilliant, with a ‘second image of Wystan … of course one with which you are all familiar: the famous poet with the face like a map of physical geography, criss-crossed and river-run and creased with lines ...”

“... In lightly dismissing their talk as harmless, he shows an obliviousness of real consequences that marks him for Dostoevsky as a typical unthinking liberal. The circle of idle chatterers around Stepan Trofimovich was dangerous because it prepared the way for the hyperactive circles that sprang up on the cleared ground. There is no doubt that Dostoevsky meant ...”

“... by a persistent reluctance to be seen as the source of the policy he commandeers. This especially marks his leadership of his party; and his precociousness has worked against him here. Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, adores Obama, and at public events can be seen to bestow on him the melting look of a senior sponsor for the protégé who has fulfilled ...”

“... dates of more than a hundred ‘lies’ were printed in boldface, the text of the lie in quotation marks and the correction in parenthesis. Most of the lies, however, were what anyone would call opportunistic half-truths, scattershot promises, changes of tack with a denial that any change had taken place and, above all, hyperbolic exaggerations. Trump uses ...”

“... of palaeontology. Desmond’s analysis is distinctive because his primary aim is not to award marks for scientific originality but to place the tensions between Huxley and Owen in their full social and political context. The animosity between them is skilfully traced from the time when Owen was writing fully supportive references for the young ...”

“... the night, she hanged herself from a doorstop on her cell wall. A postmortem revealed self-harm marks on her arms and legs, and traces of the antidepressant mirtazapine, which she hadn’t been prescribed. Katie had been in Polmont one day short of three months.The Allans broke the news to their son. They went to the mortuary to see Katie’s body. They ...”