“... halfway between Karl and Groucho – was being introduced to Anglophone readers, in translations by the Viennese refugee and Brandeis professor Harry Zohn:* Many share my views with me. But I don’t share them with them. To have talent, to be a talent: the two are always confused. Why should one artist grasp ...”

“... habit and hid her away at Argenteuil, the convent where she had been raised. This proved to be the last straw for Fulbert, whose hired thugs surprised Abelard in his sleep and ‘cut off the parts of [his] body whereby [he] had committed the wrong’. For want of a better option, the eunuch philosopher turned monk, while Heloise became a nun in ...”

“... on the non-judgmental expertise of welfare state apparatchiks, people should, the Tories believed, be reminded of the importance of ‘personal responsibility’. Regardless of Major’s precise target, Back to Basics was widely and deliberately misinterpreted by the media as a call for sexual purity, which provided a ...”

“... 1999. It wasn’t a great place for journalists. Government ministers, all mullahs who refused to be filmed, would shrug off any mildly probing inquiries with the stock reply that everything was in God’s hands. Across the city checkpoints enforced a prohibition on music. Streams of confiscated cassette tape tied to poles fluttered in the breeze. Much of the ...”

“... issue of 1960, Epoch, a quarterly published at Cornell, carried ‘The River Jordan’, a story by ‘Donald R. DeLillo’. It tells of a day in the life of Emil Burke, a mad Manhattan septuagenarian who leads a storefront chapel called the Psychic Church of the Crucified Christ, with a congregation of four. In the morning he descends to the Times Square ...”

“... from government: from the government, that is, of the rump UK, minus Scotland. The reason is that David Cameron, attempting to outflank the SNP during a midwinter silly season offensive, has managed to provoke Scotland’s first minister, Alex Salmond, into a daring dash for independence. Salmond is not – as the English fail miserably to understand – an ...”

“... use of existing texts. Constraint depends on mathematical or rule-bound procedures, as practised by the Oulipo. (US and Canadian writers seem to be on an Oulipo kick: Google ‘noulipo’, i.e. new Oulipo, for proof.) These methods let writers treat words and letters not as means to expression but as things to ...”

“... Since 1958 Butler had been the co-ordinator of a perennially impoverished study which began by examining the medical, social and economic circumstances of 17,000 babies born in the same week in March 1958, then over subsequent decades monitored their health alongside their educational and economic outcomes. This was the second such study; the first, led ...”

“... the necessary hypocrisies of the age, whereby Oliver’s sexual adventures are yearningly evoked by a gay author, yet punished as at once the inevitable fruit of disability and the seed of a judicial death. Whether Williams knew it or not, his story proposes homosexuality as a deficiency the body must register, leading to deficient behaviour: ‘Before ...”

“... campaigns, and Obama needs all the friends he can get: he is trailing Hillary Clinton nationally by nearly 20 per cent and is 30 points behind in California. You’d think Obama would be doing better, particularly out here in California, one of the more progressive of the blue states, and where youth, good looks and fast ...”

“... was straightforward, pious, brave in a crisis, not especially bright. Her whole life was shaped by her mother’s straightforwardness and bravery in a crisis: when Henry VIII wanted Katherine to accept that she had never been married to him, she refused to do so, and by her unchanging refusal, gave her daughter an example ...”

“... Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) set out to increase American purchasing power by getting the unemployed back to work. For the most part they planted forests, graded roads and developed outdoorsy holiday resorts, but the WPA also recruited 40,000 writers, theatrical workers, musicians and artists, most of them on relief, to work on four ...”

“... to visit the animals: ‘Meet your brothers, take them to your hearts and respect them.’ But as David Hancocks colourfully describes, most precursors of the modern zoo have been the opposite of this, from the circuses of Rome to the travelling menageries of the 18th and 19th centuries, shuttered in so that passers-by got ...”

“... In the penultimate chapter of David Copperfield, David and Agnes, after ten years of uneventful but blissful marriage – ‘I had advanced in fame and fortune, my domestic joy was perfect’ – are sitting by the fire in their house in London, one night in spring, when they receive a visit from an elderly stranger ...”

“... described a snowy field over which a light wind was blowing; tiny particles of snow were picked up by the wind and carried short distances in complicated patterns, so that the way the wind blew was suddenly visible, in the same way that dye in water makes visible the flow of hidden currents. Part of the test was, supposedly, to determine when the passage would ...”