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“... with Scott Fitzgerald), a ‘somewhat rackety woman’, and a character at the Oxford of Philip Larkin’s novel Jill is said to be ‘an aggressively rackety minor-public-school undergraduate’. ‘Rackety types have a link with people of the intellect,’ Powell writes in his notebook, and his novels are full of quite unintellectual types, usually ...”

“... the baillis who first appear in the administrative echelons of the French monarchy in the reign of Philip Augustus, the armed retainers of tenth and 11th-century Japan who attached themselves to regional lords rather than to the central government, the early English factory-owners still operating, so to say, as islands in a sea of small-scale artisan ...”

“... wrong. Somehow, the subject of critics’ errors came up, whereupon my mother surprisingly drew attention to this recent one, adding: ‘Not that I read the book, of course.’ Ehhh????? ‘Well, I started it and read as much as I could stand and then flipped to the end to see what happened and saw that the fellow cut his throat and thought, I wish ...”

“... In the third movement, a solo for clarinet called the ‘abîme des oiseaux’, Messiaen drew strikingly on the musical language of birds: he thought of them as angelic ambassadors of the sky. ‘Birds represent our longing for light, for stars, for rainbows, and for jubilant song,’ he wrote in the programme notes. Birdsong, idiosyncratic ...”

“... in serious poems can work will be seen in Auden’s ‘Shield of Achilles’, and in many of Philip Larkin’s poems. Rhyming in Larkin amounts to invisible virtuosity: you’d notice the difference if the rhymes weren’t there, but you hardly notice that they are. ‘That Building’ is a good case of this negative brilliance. Couplets are especially ...”

“... being expounded to a large gathering of Spanish scientists. A distinguished French civil servant drew charts of an interlocking structure of bureaux and conseils. A Harvard professor explained that the only way to do it was to exploit the creative rivalry between autonomous Federal agencies. Sir Brian Flowers (now Lord Flowers – one of the biggest wheels ...”

“... is the distinguishing feature of slavery. (Here as elsewhere Skinner acknowledges his debt to Philip Pettit’s recent Republicanism: A Theory of Liberty and Government, which can instructively be read alongside his own book.) The neo-roman writers argue that liberty, the opposite of slavery, is not attained merely through the removal of interference or ...”

“... his prescient opening staves: Aficionados of the modern American novel have learned to look to Philip Roth for complex literary constructions that play wittily with narrative voice and frame. One thinks of such Roth works as My Life as a Man and The Counterlife. Now Saul Bellow has demonstrated that among his other well-recognised literary gifts is an ...”

“... was the subject’s foundations in individual choice rather than discussions of large forces that drew him. He read Mill and Marshall and was excited by Hayek’s lectures and those of the brilliant Abba Lerner. But it was Philip Barrett Whale, who worked on international trade, who prompted Hirschman’s first paper and ...”

“... the Civil War, famous for the ‘Water Cure’ at the Brattleboro Hydropathic Establishment, which drew on the pure springs along the Whetstone Brook. The town later produced reed organs – ‘providing music for the whole of America’ – but the once flourishing factories of the Estey Organ Company are closed now, the buildings empty in their ...”

“... of Hadrian (1951), her finest book and often considered the best French novel of the 20th century, drew on the surviving contemporary sources of the life and reign of the emperor, as well as more recent works in Latin, German, French, English and Italian, to imagine the dying Hadrian describing his life to his successor. Twenty years of ...”

“... Ministry of Agriculture. What is rather surprising is that at least three of the characters – Philip Schnäbele, Jean-Yves Fréhaut and Catherine Lechardoy – actually exist, and have simply been plonked into the book. Understandably, they took it badly: they are represented, like many characters in Houellebecq’s novels, as pointless and ...”

“... direct insult to the British flag’. The Admiralty issued a worldwide alert, and the War Office drew up strategic plans. London and Liverpool erupted in pro-Confederate demonstrations; street-corner salesmen hawked rebel banners while Adams fretted ineffectually and Moran ground his teeth. In Washington, at a ball for the Portuguese minister, Seward warned ...”

“... publish his poems, but broke down again and failed to get a degree. Student friends, who included Philip Hobsbaum and Ted Hughes, registered that Redgrove was impressively unusual. Hobsbaum thought he bore ‘a resemblance to Frankenstein’s monster, only better dressed’. Harry Guest recalls him carrying ‘a swordstick with him’ – like a Mr Hyde ...”

“... who composed its city comedy-like scenes – and because the text we have is unfinished. Hytner drew in popular unrest of the sort shown in the Jack Cade scenes of Henry VI Part II and by the mob in Julius Caesar. To make Timon of Athens a play for today is to cut through a lot of differences between Jacobean and modern London. Again, this is ...”