“... even if there are occasional awkwardnesses of word order and clashes of register. (To say, of Peter the First’s interest in anatomical specimens, that the tsar ‘got chills’ looking at preserved human foetuses would be a terrible piece of phrasing even if it didn’t tap into a deep pop-cultural memory of John Travolta’s voice.) Ilinca ...”

“... a development Lanier would help to introduce to Britain. This was the era of Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones, when the masque was at its extravagant height under James I, and in 1613, around the time this portrait was painted, Lanier composed his first masque song, ‘Bring away this sacred tree’, and performed it at court in The Squires’ Masque. Lanier was ...”

“... Thirty years later, when Eliot’s prestige and influence were at their zenith, John Peter, a Canadian academic, published an article in Essays in Criticism called ‘A New Interpretation of The Waste Land’. Peter argued that the poem was at heart an elegy that might be compared to Tennyson’s In ...”

“... of this journal cannot be unaware, there appeared last year a controversial volume edited by Peter Widdowson called Re-Reading English, which faithfully applied Williams’s critique of academic English, and equally faithfully reproduced many of the shortcomings of his manner, including its open political bias and its embarrassing shortage of ...”

“... a 15-year-old, adds wire cheese-cutters and sharpened bicycle chains to the list. ‘In Essex,’ Peter Fleming says in Invasion 1940, ‘an unexpected windfall made possible the formation of a cutlass platoon, 24 strong, under the command of a former naval rating.’ He also tells how ‘four dozen rusty Lee Enfields, relics of some forgotten tableau or ...”

“... grown up around the Second World War, and even at the prime minister (although the groundwork for Peter Cook’s brutal takedown of Harold Macmillan had already been laid by The Goon Show’s Peter Sellers with his sketch ‘Party Political Speech’, which was released as the B-side of a single two years before Beyond the ...”

“... in 1896 at William Morris’s Kelmscott Press (‘a pocket cathedral’, according to Edward Burne-Jones); or Mr William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (1623), the book we call the First Folio but shouldn’t (because it wasn’t). These are big books, both physically and in their impact, but they are also vastly unrepresentative. And in ...”

“... such a policy would be the sure path to mediocrity for our whole university system. Professor D.S. Jones, the Chairman of the UGC Mathematics sub-committee, has put forward for his own subject a quite different policy for deciding which academic staff should be shed. He points out that the great expansion of the Sixties meant that far more academics were ...”

“... Culture and Conquest (2006), or Robert Ferguson’s The Hammer and the Cross (2009), or even Gwyn Jones’s magisterial History of the Vikings (1968, revised 1973). Consider the ‘key questions’ Parker starts with. First, why should Scandinavian societies have turned so suddenly to overseas raiding, and second, why, after several centuries, did the raiding ...”

“... How great a diversity, Swift can hardly have imagined; it needed the researches of a William Jones or a Wilhelm von Humboldt to begin to persuade literary Europeans that they were not quite the masters of the speaking world. Now we know better – well, perhaps just a little. We know that something like four thousand languages are spoken in the world ...”

“... bachelors, and that’s still the template. Dorothy L. Sayers hardly seemed to believe in Peter Wimsey’s passion for Harriet Vane, and no one else is likely to. In his book Strangers: Homosexual Love in the 19th Century, Graham Robb made a strong case that the granddaddy of them all, Poe’s Dupin, is coded as homosexual. Offering a dry précis of ...”

“... many, succeeded by Neil Cassady (‘Neil Cassady was my animal: he brought me to my knees’) and Peter Orlovsky. And although Ginsberg’s orientation was basically that of a homosexual masochist, he made occasional forays into heterosexuality, writing enthusiastically to Kerouac of ‘a great new girl who digs me, I dig – 22, young, hip’, with ‘a wild ...”

“... like the entries in Who’s Who. There are some known names: Cecil Beaton, Jasper Johns, James Jones, John Mortimer, Patricia Neal, William Styron, Andy Warhol. Among the rest are antique dealers, decorators, magazine editors, a ‘freelance music co-ordinator for fashion shows’, a princess ‘internationally concerned with matters of spiritual ...”

“... is a transsexual, but the suggestion is that she wants to conform to society and can’t, just as Peter Pan, as Barrie finally admitted to himself, wanted to grow up, but couldn’t. Women are treated in The Well without much sympathy, and almost always as empty-headed. The whole book supports the view that men are naturally superior, which is why Stephen ...”

“... keep a sizeable library in my locker (though my reading was not as highbrow as my fellow historian Peter Burke’s during his stint as a pay clerk in Singapore, which in a typical two days, Vinen tells us, included Galileo, Gide and Rimbaud). Although subject to weekly parades and periodic kit inspections, we were excused weapon training and most other ...”