“... as if with an eye to leaving a crisp morsel for the historian. In his 1974 biography of Pepys, Richard Ollard said that there clings to him ‘an irresistible air of bedroom farce’, with ‘furtive lecheries so vivaciously pursued’. The earlier multi-volume life by Sir Arthur Bryant had done much to rescue him from his popular reputation of Slippery ...”

“... Robert Peary claiming the North Pole for America, and how, to keep up the morale of his men, Richard Collinson erected a billiard table on the sea-ice of Cambridge Bay. The table was fashioned from snow blocks, the cushions from walrus skin stuffed with oakum. The table surface was a finely-shaved sheet of freshwater ice; the balls were hand-carved from ...”

“... sickness – ‘Did you think missionaries always were bright and happy and hopeful? Well, there may be some of that kind but they are not out here’ – and in 1900, during the Boxer Uprising, she, her husband and their daughter were all killed, seemingly by Government troops. The East travelled to the West, though not in any missionary spirit, when ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the shape of new interpretations has yet to crystallise. What happened to the Soviet Union in 1991 may be characterised as a revolution – not in the sense of a spontaneous popular movement overturning the old regime (which it certainly wasn’t), but in the sense of an abrupt political, economic and ideological transformation as sweeping in its impact and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... smuggling drugs. The Czechoslovak authorities who arrested Derrida this January on the same charge may have been repeating the classic mistake of metaphysics by taking language as reality. Although having risked imprisonment in the name of the free discussion of philosophy certainly makes Derrida a political hero, it still will not make him a philosophical ...”

“... communal feeling, multiculturalism and musical attunement to the ecosphere. These are the views of Richard King, who is responsible for the Afrocentrist pages on the World Wide Web. Not myself a devotee, I can only quote the electronic address at which surfers should be able to check for themselves: http://www.melanet.com/melanet/ubus/melib.html In a sense now ...”

“... your Prospero.Marsyas was flayed for not knowing his place. Harrison has been luckier: school may not have accommodated his talent (‘He possesses something of the poetical imagination,’ his final report said, ‘but suffers from the waywardness of that gift’), but he put it to use, eventually making his way from Leeds to Broadway.He was helped by ...”

“... beginning to wonder whether the high-tech, jargoned, reader-alienating image of the modern product may not have some disadvantages. Of course it can be argued that there can be no going back, the old criticism having been declared intellectually deluded, dishonest and collusive with political authoritarianism. ‘With the advent of Post-Structuralism and the ...”

“... fierce because Descartes was at bottom aware that one can’t rule out the possibility that matter may be conscious. Many of the false naturalists, by contrast, have no such doubts. Some of them will deny this. They will insist that they do admit the existence of consciousness or experience, and do allow that it can be physical. But they do this by changing ...”

“... Iago as her dog-faced seducer, the embittered servant De Flores. Thus the unsentimental Middleton may well have a better claim to be regarded as Shakespeare’s heir than his official successor as principal dramatist for the King’s Men, John Fletcher, the sentimental doyen of romantic tragicomedy. After Marlowe, Middleton had perhaps the most arrestingly ...”