“... the woman in the tight pinstriped suit waiting at the bottom of the ramp in the third book, who may or may not be the same ‘luscious lady’ with ‘shapely legs’ and a ‘short, snugly fitting blue pinstriped suit’ who mysteriously pays his bus fare in the first one. There’s also the bus conductress he will have ...”

“... only in textbooks. Among the most distinctive voices is that of Marcabru, a lower-class poet who may have invented the pastorela genre. His shepherdess sees right through the suasions of her courtly wooer: ‘Sir, a man whose brain’s gone balmy Swears great oaths, but he’s still crazy; Why make vows and try to praise me? Master,’ said this peasant ...”

“... how artificial a construct it is, it has warning bells built in. The central characters are called Richard and Karen; Karen is very, very thin; she takes one diet pill too many and is visited by aliens. And so on. Names, chapter-titles, bits of dialogue and even the central plot concept in this most crashingly earnest of novels are also the most frivolous of ...”

“... and invasion plans. Yet the government wasn’t of one mind. The secretary of state for war, Richard Haldane, remained anxious to build better relations with Germany and at first didn’t hesitate to express his impatience with the scare: when asked by Sir John Barlow, MP for Frome, whether he was aware that there were 66,000 German soldiers in England ...”

“... unprecedented and wonderful (the Louvre’s is the version copyists soon fastened on), and it may well be that a courtier or emissary had made him a better offer. Some scholars wonder if the Confraternity balked at the picture, considered as an exposition of its great Immaculate theme. It does seem to make more sense – though nothing, in my view, is ...”

“... status’. When we look at some of the words Ogilvie identifies as suffering in this way, we may feel a little sympathetic to Burchfield: was it so strange for him to apply this most discreet of labels to sambal, the name of a Malay condiment, or kuruma, a Japanese word for a rickshaw? Burchfield arrived in Oxford from New Zealand in 1949 and died in ...”

“... years, but nothing to compare with what happened in response to 9/11. According to the jurist Richard Falk, September 11 saw a terrible departure from the norm that prevailed in the aftermath of the Second World War, when, so it was said, the right to make war – the jus ad bellum – came under strict legal control: World War Two ended with the ...”

“... of ‘Dutch Graves in Bucks County’, a poem that Wallace Stevens published in 1943. The image may have come from a march-of-time documentary of Americans training to fight in the Second World War. Probably the machines included tanks and a lorry convoy, possibly a squadron of fighter planes. What became of the angry men when the war was over? I grew up in ...”

“... the critic John Dennis, John Dyer (the author of the loco-descriptive smash-hit Grongar Hill), Richard Savage, Nahum Tate (the Poet Laureate) and Edward Young (Night Thoughts). For a while, early in his career, Hill acted as secretary to Lord Peterborough, the future honorary Scriblerian; he was also later distantly linked with Bolingbroke, to whom he ...”

“... the establishment of some higher ethical concept.’ Consciousness of his honourable calling may induce the poet to present himself as at once dignified and eccentric – epithets which catch some aspects of Empson as a social presence. Part of his eccentricity must be an interest, unshared by most literary people, in the greatest imaginative ...”

“... he likened to a novel by Balzac. That was the last film Stroheim completed as a director. He may be better known as an actor (‘the man you love to hate’, La Grande Illusion, Sunset Boulevard), but in the history of film he made more of a mark as a director. It was his accumulation of detail that earned Stroheim a place in old film histories as the ...”

“... curvaceous wooden form strung like a harp which we gaze at in dumbfounded silence. These days, it may well be a drystone wall winding between trees before burying its end in a lake, like the great Norse serpent for ever drinking the world’s waters dry. Or a cairn on a Highland headland with a fire flaming inside it. Or a longboat made of stakes and stones ...”

“... looked as if they had been made from blankets), new clothes gave him a heart-pumping thrill. He may have been hard up, but he wanted several cashmere sweaters, a dark blue jacket and a pair of saddle shoes. Late one night he broke into a dry-cleaner’s and took everything that fitted. It was dark in the shop and the booty was disappointing, for the most ...”

“... Davis remembers him telling her that he used to get nervous before delivering them. Part of it may have been to do with the methodical patience he learned during his two years in the mountain fastness of the Sierra Maestra. It was also the place where Castro, who worshipped Martí’s verses and read Gabriel García Márquez’s first drafts, wrote his own ...”

“... recent exercise – it’s now called the Research Excellence Framework – were released last May. The assessments are the Thatcher government’s most significant contribution to research policy, and are obsessed over by university leaders, emulated in some countries and studied in many more. They have both reflected and facilitated the UK’s ...”