“... historians (Kenyon among them) who believe in his greatness. Maitland’s relationship with Leslie Stephen and avid interest in Meredith’s novels would appear to be precisely the kind of detail Kenyon enjoys. Some room might have been found for Sir Henry Mame’s genius, even while debating whether he fits the category of historian. Much better use could ...”

“... Another time he had given up because his ‘work fell so far short of the standards set by Leslie Stephen’. But I suspect he was amused by a young man’s persistence and when, eventually, the proof stage of one volume was reached, he would call at the office, listen to my trivial comments, courteously accepting some of them, and then take me out to lunch ...”

“... your love dressed all in white, but come back only from the grave. The Victorians revelled in it. Stephen Foster’s audience grieved for Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair, the lost one ‘who comes not again’. The big Romantics all had their more portentous versions, from Lucy ceasing to be, to Shelley’s solipsistic sad heart, filled with grief ‘but ...”

“... the United States experienced a less obtrusive coup d’état: the hustled retirement of Justice Stephen Breyer, the oldest of the three remaining liberals on the Supreme Court. The prematurely leaked announcement in late January took Breyer himself by surprise. But the leak wasn’t any more of a breach of constitutional decorum than the insistent lobbying ...”

“... in which the Greeks and Alexander, though disruptive, play an essentially peripheral role. Stephen Ruzicka sets out to correct this in Trouble in the West, and he does so with formidable scholarship, a talent for extracting the maximum possible amount from evidence often as obscure as it is patchy, and a commendably objective approach to the sort of ...”

“... and even managed to gain the disapproval of his old primary school teacher who, according to Stephen Gilbert, admired his final interview but was not pleased when ‘he said “God the old bugger” ... I didn’t like that.’ It was such a successful finale that I still expect the credits to roll and Potter to pop up again to instruct us not to assume ...”

“... components of Britishness that is the fundamental cause of the monarchy’s current malaise. Stephen Haseler, author of one of the most intelligent of the 1993 vintage of royal books, is absolutely right that ‘the magnitude of the appropriation by the monarchy of the symbols of nationhood and authority is breathtaking.’ Her Majesty’s Government ...”

“... nearly complete as is reasonable to expect – account of the evolution of modern horses from the small lamb-sized Eohippus over the past 55 million years. Evolution can even account for the fact that Eohippus had three toes on its foot, and the modern horse has but one. But for all those 55 million years, the existence of mares and stallions has been a ...”

“... two on the inevitable punishments to come (‘The Reckoning I’ and ‘The Reckoning II’, à la Stephen King) and a final mournful coda, ‘Requiem’ – for unlike redemptionists who denounce sin and threaten hellfire only to preach and promise salvation, Galbraith forecasts an inevitable downfall of relative economic decline, further tormented by ...”

“... a holiday diary kept in childhood, figured in the Tribute to W.H. Auden organised not long ago by Stephen Spender.) In general, the facts in the book are effectively deployed, but they are sometimes insufficient and uncertain. Mr Osborne’s, of course, was not an easy task. Like quite a few artists, Auden lived off rumour, and was the cause of rumour in ...”

“... substitute, an alternative in spirituality. Quite the reverse. Whitman and James, just as much as Stephen Crane and Hemingway, helped the liberation of American literature into physicality, inspired by but growing away from the Emersonian traditions of Puritan New England. Poe, whom Whitman met when they were fellow editors of ...”

“... of wire, jewellery and false hair). Thanks to a lawsuit brought in 1612 by their son-in-law, Stephen Belott, over the non-payment of the dowry allegedly promised with their daughter, Mary, in 1604, we know a good deal more about the Mountjoy family’s affairs than we do about those of their lodger, whose bit-part role as a go-between in the marriage ...”

“... the room for the last few minutes; now he returns with a bottle of arak, a jug of water and live small glasses. Baby cucumbers are produced, along with a selection of unripe peaches as hard as cricket balls. ‘I disagree with Samir, this is not the time to change the intifada,’ says Bashir, keen to rejoin the discussion. ‘During the Gulf War we ...”

“... more to discover; that our best current theory of its nature may turn out to be wrong, either in small details or large (if, for example, a paradigm shift occurs in the plant sciences, revealing that we have radically misconceived its nature); and even that some aspects of reality (material, psychological, moral) might resist our understanding ...”

“... a barn owl with a mouse in its beak, caught by Eric Hosking in 1948, a brown rat photographed by Stephen Dalton as it jumped from a bin in 1983. Curiosity about the look of exotic tribes was not limited to pictures from abroad. The four performers of the Abbot’s Bromley Horn Dance, taken by Benjamin Stone in 1899, stare at the camera as grimly as Papuan ...”