“... goods up the River Parrett under the name of the Somerset Trading Company. Robert’s younger son, Thomas, married the niece of Samuel Stuckey, the founder of Stuckey’s Bank, a sizeable local house which had already swallowed up several tiddlers. Thomas rose to become vice-chairman, and so in due course did his son ...”

“... Sylvester, often hard to understand. So much drink in the book that I wonder, had I liked drink more, would it have altered my life and made it more eventful. Not only do I hardly drink and Rupert neither, but I don’t know anyone who does, Peter Cook about the only drunk I’ve ever known. In New York in the 1980s I ...”

“... Hollywood the dream empire and Silicon Valley the information empire both arose there, and she more or less claims that neither could have sprung from anywhere else. Solnit also claims that Muybridge – his peculiar inventive work and changeable life, his very personality – contributed, at their genesis in the emerging technologies of his time, to the ...”

“... criticism’. Partly, the crisis which now afflicts English studies is a reflection of a more general cultural atmosphere – for example, that futureless and pastless sense of blankness which is for various reasons the quality that distinguishes the present generation of students. It could also be seen as a response to the period of critical ...”

“... Charles Eliot Norton lectures she declares, with no shadow of demonstration or argument, that Thomas Hardy the poet ‘cannot by any standard of evaluation be called great’. Though an Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Oxford obviously speaks on such matters with authority, for Dame Helen to deliver herself of this ex cathedra judgment solely ...”

“... to seek a poetic equivalent for Neruda’s moony-stony-windy-bloody rhetoric in pastiche Dylan Thomas, or for his vatic tone in Ginsberg’s spaced-out measures, but both of these devices would have risked who knows what comic effects. Something new, something that could not be prescribed, was called for. What a pity we do not find it here. Oxford’s ...”

“... National Portrait Gallery foolishly accepted. The Victorians made the Greeks out to have been far more like themselves than they can have been: by now anthropology and sociology have shown how dangerous analogies between their society and ours can be. Indeed, we have gone too far in the opposite direction: anyone who points to a resemblance between Greek ...”

“... he left after a year. Abandonment after a few months of the Army career he had chosen involved more debts to be paid by Allan, who for the three years of life remaining to him was intermittently though unsuccessfully dunned by the young man he condemned as ‘destitute of honor & principle every day of his life has only served to confirm his debased ...”

“... length of 323 pages, he argued that no one knows anything, ever did, or could ever do so. How even more ironic, given the success of the scientific method, that the most strident denials of knowledge have been levelled against the sciences. This, too, goes back to the Greeks, especially to Sextus Empiricus, who, in a work called Adversus Mathematicos, offered ...”

“... charged political provocations and resistance.This tradition endures: in the US, seven states and more than three dozen cities now claim sanctuary status, refusing to cooperate with requests from Immigration and Customs Enforcement to detain undocumented immigrants. Churches serve as political sanctuaries, continuing a medieval custom: Francisca Lino, a ...”

“... as a good night’s sleep. Ekirch’s first chapter is on the ‘terrors of the night’. In 1594 Thomas Nashe, the collaborator of Shakespeare, Marlowe and Jonson, published a little pamphlet, ‘speedily botched up and compiled’, as he put it, called The Terrors of the Night or A Discourse of Apparitions. It is full of digressions: ‘I have rid a false ...”

“... looking earnest or seductive. There was no dust-jacket. I did it because I had to. It’s all more complicated than that, but there you have it. I had no idea of the consequences of the decision I had made. Kleinzahler was born in 1949 and grew up in Fort Lee, New Jersey, just across from the George Washington Bridge. He went to college in Wisconsin, but ...”

“... Cecil was spotted going into the house. As he left, he was shot 16 times. He was 32. It took them more than three years to get the third Graham brother. They had tried to kill Jimmy in 1980, but he had fought them off, and been given the British Empire Medal. Perhaps his escape had annoyed them, or perhaps, as many Protestants believed, there was a deliberate ...”

“... little legally significant about it. Moore dedicates the book to her parents ‘in celebration of more than 50 years of marital harmony’, but what follows is a survivor story: what does it signify if you haven’t got a man, so long as you don’t marry a sociopath? Mary Bowes was the richest heiress in 18th-century Britain, ‘perhaps even ...”

“... as Giovan Battista Marino soon began to twist admiring conceits around this startling immediacy. More verbal wrapping has swathed Caravaggio since he returned, in the 1950s, to the art-historical spotlight after three centuries in the wings. But commentators are all on the back foot. We might argue that having trained in the north, Caravaggio learned ...”