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“... of course, it’s Banks up-front, Major on the bench and Mellor for the early bath.) For a time, Richard Attenborough was club chairman. Viewed from the bleak kingdom of Don Revie up in Leeds, these ‘southern softies’ never stood a chance. It was Leeds, though, who lost – narrowly and unluckily – to Chelsea in that 1970 final. According to Alan ...”

“... great past, crumbling down, breaking down, not under the force of the coming buds, but under the weight of many exhausted, lovely yellow leaves, that drift over the lawn and over the pond ... It has been 2000 years, the spring and summer of our era. What then will the winter be? Lawrence wasn’t alone in forecasting the unravelling of everything. Hardy ...”

“... that 1940 does not have the iconic power of 1914 – one could not imagine the poem bearing the weight of the title ‘MCMXL’. Evocative as they are, Causley’s images (‘tin adverts warming in the sun’, ‘an empty chocolate-machine’) do not denote anything larger, more momentous, in the way that each of Larkin’s stands inexorably for the passing ...”

“... about the same age, at Laetoli near the Olduvai Gorge which she and her late husband Louis and son Richard have so fully investigated. Evidence has been appearing so rapidly in the last two decades that it is courageous of our authors to try to put it all together as a thesis about the rate of human evolution. They believe that ‘by looking in detail at the ...”

“... perception that the bugs have gone on the rampage, and epidemiologists are reluctant to put much weight on stories. But the recent ones have been very persuasive. In New York in 2010 bedbugs turned up in the Empire State Building, a theatre in the Lincoln Center, and at the Metropolitan Opera House. It is said that they were in attendance at the 2005 Labour ...”

“... plays and novels were eventually translated into 30 languages, and he knew everyone from Richard Strauss to Walther Rathenau. He even persuaded Mussolini to reduce a friend’s prison sentence. But though he courted the famous and the powerful, he insisted on his own indifference to politics. The account in his autobiography of his experiences during ...”

“... Both Dracula and Frankenstein owed their immediate afterlife to unfortunate theatre adaptations. Richard Brinsley Peake’s Presumption: or, The Fate of Frankenstein (1823) turned Mary Shelley’s book into a moralistic tale of hubris, as well as making the creature mute and introducing Victor Frankenstein’s pantomimic assistant (here called Fritz). The ...”

“... decadence, hopeful of renovation, people transfer their mood to the decade, the illusory dead weight of an old century behind them, and before them the perhaps equally illusory promises of a new one. In the arts these ages of transition tend to breed avant-gardes to whom contempt for the past is a necessary condition of radical innovation, an old calendar ...”

“... view of the plays, never considered here, and perhaps thought merely sentimental, that gives some weight to what they have become (especially when the change happened so early) as well as to what they originally were. Another editorial decision, defended at length in the General Introduction, goes against the weight of ...”

“... individual acts of exchange. Like most scholars of the free-market movement, Rodgers assigns great weight to Milton Friedman, ‘the University of Chicago’s most forceful politiciser’, and the right’s answer to J.K. Galbraith. He wrote columns for Newsweek, advised presidents (and dictators), and organised the ten-part PBS series Free to Choose as a ...”

“... easily forget – not after the strange rictus of that smile. External appearances naturally have weight in a story that depends on action, but some of those appearances are so arresting that it’s easy to suppose there’s nothing underneath. Signs are supposed to mean something, particularly in detective fiction. The point of the footprint, the ...”

“... an antique fair. That’s just how we are I’m afraid.’ This is an arch piece of marketing from Richard Osman, promoting his detective novels to an American readership. There’s no reason to suppose that British people are better at hiding in plain sight than anyone else. However, they do like a murder story, and a thriving industry has grown up around ...”

“... then would have swived the other sister both’. He fought for the invading Tudor forces against Richard III. Unsubstantiated legend has him as a standard-bearer at Bosworth, cut down close to the person of the man who would soon be king. Whatever the exact truth, he died a hero with a claim on the gratitude of the new regime. He did not leave much land for ...”

“... to an absent fraternity of villains: ‘And from the six-foot rope, I fear/My neck will know the weight of my rear.’ The other two may also have been written at this time, but if so, after news of the pardon. One is addressed to Etienne Garnier, the clerk of the Châtelet prison, who, as Sargent-Bauer says, seems to have advised Villon against an ...”

“... from whom a degree of advocacy is appropriate. ‘In Solitude, for Company’, together with Richard Davenport-Hines’s new biography of the poet, provides further confirmation that Audens are a definite buy. The wavering flame of academic attention has been nursed through the dangerous, immediately posthumous years, and is now – with some help from ...”