“... is stranger than fiction, he says in Heretics, ‘for we have made fiction to suit ourselves’. William Oddie’s book is a painstaking and intelligent study of the man who was not yet quite the Chesterton we have been looking at. This early life is a neglected area in Chesterton studies, Oddie tells us, and he found ‘existing biographies of little ...”

“... and, therefore, from access to the Tree of Life. No more low-hanging fruit: from then on we had to hunt, farm and cook. The Earth itself was injured by original sin: it became less fertile and its produce less nourishing, taking a toll on human longevity. The patriarchs were not immortal, but they were built to last. Methuselah was out in the nervous 900s, and ...”

“... males can rewrite a life. Schreiner gets into the DNB as an appendix to her lawyer brother William. William is not mentioned in the Companion entry, even as an appendix. The Companion is careful to note that Olive’s mother, ‘a brilliant, exacting Englishwoman’, ‘once beat her for using an Afrikaans ...”

“... in turn, are helped by Ella Grogan, the daughter of a local midwife and a gardener’s boy, William. All the characters in this hierarchy gain some narrative attention, but mainly it plays over the old man and the Paxtons’ daughter Alice. Between them, these two mark off a momentous span of English historical time. Alice is born on the eve of Eden’s ...”

“... now out of print, and have been available only to those sharp-eyed collectors who were prepared to hunt them through the random classifications and dusty shelves of second-hand bookshops. That skill is no longer required. The new volume contains all of The Art of the Soluble, and most of The Hope of Progress. To these are added the contents of a slim volume on ...”

“... devised by men, and spurious in its concern for women.’ Among Place’s contemporaries, only William Cobbett disagreed with him, believing that the change was no more than ‘modesty in the word and grossness in the thought’, as proven by the growing number of prostitutes who ‘now swarm in our towns’, and by a rise in illegitimate births. Mason ...”

“... Here are the earthbound details that illuminate one aspect of the life of a soaring spirit. William Schaberg is a bibliophile who in 1984 was able to buy an 1889 copy of Götzendämmerung (Twilight of the Idols), the purchase of which set him on a collector’s hunt for other early copies of Nietzsche’s works and on ...”

“... of which British poets should be honoured by inclusion in the book. Such behaviour, as William St Clair amply demonstrates in his magnificent, original and compelling study, was characteristic of the London publishers. His book stretches far wider than its title suggests. He has a mass of new and fascinating things to say about the centuries that ...”

“... pleasure in every phase of their more ghastly homicides; from the moment a corpse was found the hunt for morbid thrills was intense. After seven members of the Marshall family were hacked to death at Denham in 1870, ‘pleasure vans’ brought hordes of day-trippers from London to see the gore, and to purloin souvenirs. The Victorians were not dainty in ...”

“... and courage dictated. It helped their enemies that some puritans were not only flaky but mad. William Hacket, a maltster, boasted of wrestling lions at the Tower of London, and supposedly once bit off a schoolmaster’s nose (and swallowed it). He progressed from mimicking radical preachers to providing exorcisms and false prophecy; finally, he claimed to ...”

“... of the News of the World, then edited by Coulson, intercepted the voicemail messages of Princes William and Harry. Goodman was arrested, and the police found 15 confidential palace phone books at his house in Putney. They also found five thousand names mentioned in 11,000 pages of handwritten notes at the home and in the office of Glenn Mulcaire, the ...”

“... the scandalous back-handers paid to members of the Shah’s family and entourage in the hunt for contracts. An unfortunate side-effect of Parsons’s self-denying ordinance was that it left the Embassy almost as isolated as the Shah himself when it came to domestic intelligence. The Embassy went wrong, Parsons admits, in its assumption that the Shah ...”

“... Enzo Rossi, protesting against the suspension of Jodi Dean, a professor of politics at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, from her academic duties. In a blog post, Dean – a communist and anti-Zionist – had remarked of the early scenes from 7 October:Who could not feel energised seeing oppressed people bulldozing the fences enclosing them, taking to the ...”

“... were none – only mixed-race Tasmanians and those deported to the Australian mainland survived. (William Lanne, the ‘last man’ of Tom Lawson’s title, died in 1869; two Tasmanian women survived him briefly.) There is also disagreement about the way they met their end, or rather about the relative roles played by settler violence, intertribal ...”

“... wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualising, you probably hunt about till you find the exact words that seem to fit it ...’ Orwell is content to believe that the relation between language, cognition and utterance is as straightforward as this passage says it is. The fact that ‘the meaning’ does not choose ‘the ...”