“... enters in majesty and introduces the instruments of modern science. The open-air production took full shape during Empson’s summer absence at the School of Letters in Bloomington, Indiana. The student producer, Peter Cheeseman (now Director of the New Victoria Theatre, North Staffordshire), together with the stage manager Alan Curtis, bulked up ...”

“... to leave France in the face of royal prohibition, they continued to be busy and productive. John Houblon, from a Huguenot family which had arrived from France in a slightly earlier wave of Catholic persecution, became the first governor of the Bank of England in 1694 and a knight of the realm; until 2014, his luxuriantly bewigged features adorned our ...”

“... may be seen as a courteous but firm reproof to those who, like me, brought up on Arthur Machen, John Buchan, Rosemary Sutcliff, Mary Renault and Henry Treece, not to mention H.P. Lovecraft, got the wrong idea a long time ago and have been reluctant to abandon it. The wrong idea is the ‘widely held belief that the ancient pre-Christian religions of Europe ...”

“... having sex together. When they went on holiday to the seaside town of Portobello the teachers took Jane Cumming with them: Miss Pirie and Miss Woods shared a bed; Miss Cumming slept in a bed at the foot of theirs. She claimed it was at Portobello that she had first been disturbed by whispering, kissing and ‘shaking the bed’ in the early mornings. She ...”

“... By God, America is great, and so are its scholarly books. This one is 572 pages long and it took the author twenty years to write. Longer than Katherine Anne Porter found to write the whole of her resplendent work. Joan Givner’s book might be called light plane reading, except that it is heartlessly grave, gravid though fruitless, and would take the most receptive astronauts a moon-flight to try to sleep through, its dulled prose keeping them tossing and turning all the way ...”

“... actress Simone Benda, who pulled every string, in vain, to get him the Prix Goncourt. He took to racing cars and flying – ‘like Peter Pan’, he told Francis Jammes. Le Grand Meaulnes was written, for the most part, in Rue Cassini. If he had survived the war, what would he have written? Not, probably, Colombe Blanchet, which he had begun, but, as ...”

“... I was a sinner too and was mean to me, meaner than the others really. I felt bad because she took care of my sister and wouldn’t even let me in the kitchen with them. I was in constant terror of mother and grandpa and awful school torments too. I was expelled from two schools and ran away from one in first year. However in El Paso I met my first and ...”

“... wretchedly unsure of herself – she once felt like throwing it in the farm dam – but when she took the book to London soon afterwards, it had a wide success and the young author was swept up in freethinking, socialist and Utopian circles. The real attraction and challenge of Olive Schreiner for her many biographers is to take hold of a multi-sided career ...”

“... help from the tardy Prussians. Siborne’s heresy, Hofschröer contends, proved his undoing. He took enormous care in the construction of the model: an experienced cartographer, he visited the site in Belgium, and he read all the accounts of the battle. Most diligently of all, he questioned as many Waterloo veterans – British, Hanoverian, Prussian and ...”

“... should fairly be credited with more successes than failures, even at the time when millions took to the streets to denounce him. Right up to the end of February, he seemed to have the better of the argument. Who would have thought that Iraq’s benighted regime would submit to this degree of containment by a peaceful UN process, backed by the credible ...”

“... reverberations from those events reached a long way: as far as the Cold War, the assassination of John F. Kennedy (maybe), Watergate and, every four years to this day, the American presidential election. It is a story that reminds us of the bond – political, cultural, economic, sentimental – between the United States and Cuba, a bond that tightened in the ...”

“... seen before. The room was ill-lit, and the future bridegroom was short-sighted. Without a word, he took a candle in his hand, and with a faint smile on his thin lips he slowly walked round the girl, examining her points ‘as if about to buy a piece of furniture’.Guiccioli was one of the foremost men of Ravenna, the owner of a fine palace, a country house, a ...”

“... Front’s 168 candidates secured an average vote of 8.9 per cent. During a Commons debate in July, John Stokes, the Conservative MP for Halesowen and Stourbridge, a former admirer of General Franco and a supporter of the Monday Club, pointed to the growing constituency for the National Front and insisted that ‘a date must soon be fixed beyond which no ...”

“... the ‘impact’ component of high medieval scholarship – quickly and easily.The index took what was nearly its definitive shape in the manuscript world of the 14th and 15th centuries. A table of contents could offer useful guidance to the structure of a work written on one or more scrolls, but there was no simple way to list and direct traffic to ...”

“... that what he was looking at was a proper subject for ‘the powers of an English painter’. It took Brown 13 years to finish this ambitious picture. He endlessly packed and re-packed the picture to accommodate more thought, more observation, further depths of conviction. It was a painting that became a manifesto, a text to be read and learned from. The ...”