“... from which Ricks takes the title of his volume. Johnson speaks of ‘that force which calls new powers into being, which embodies sentiment, and animates matter’. The essay on Gower starts by propounding one of those popular critical problems which have little bearing on the ordinary reader’s enjoyment of literature: are an author’s effects ‘the ...”

“... green contact lenses, painfully painted on. Sole survivor of Atlantis, he used his special powers, notably the ability to survive high atmospheric pressure, to foil the evil plans of an evil-looking villain with an evil-looking beard and an evil-sounding German name: Schubert. Even my enormous teenage appetite for the fantastical and men in swimming ...”

“... remain) or St James blackballer could wish: D.H. Lawrence (seven vols), Virginia Woolf (six vols), Thomas Hardy (seven vols) and Katherine Mansfield (four vols). The Conrad project, begun in 1983, is moving to its close with this, the sixth instalment of what will be an eight-volume set. These compilations are among the most expensive and least remunerative ...”

“... seven countries including Britain and Argentina have claims). The American and Soviet super-powers are parties to both arrangements. Among the many morals to be learned from the events of 1982 is the need for member-states of the United Nations to reinforce the Charter’s absolute prohibition on the use of force, as an instrument of change; as for the ...”

“... industrial communities even strengthened the language for a time. As the Welsh economist Brinley Thomas put it, ‘the unrighteous Mammon, in opening up the coalfields at such a pace, unwittingly gave the Welsh language a new lease of life, and Welsh Nonconformity a glorious high noon.’ There are still large numbers of Welsh-speakers in the ...”

“... passengers, who included the American tycoon Alfred Vanderbilt and the Welsh mining magnate D.A. Thomas. The German submarine U-20 had already torpedoed three British cargo vessels off the Irish coast. At lunchtime on 7 May its captain, Walther Schwieger, sighted a four-stack passenger liner, clearly British, and dived to intercept her. He fired a single ...”

“... attempt to restore peace and stability by introducing regular conferences at which the victorious powers – Britain, Russia, Austria and Prussia – could tackle problems as they arose. Castlereagh was cautiously magnanimous in victory: ‘It is not our business to collect trophies, but to try … [to] bring back the world to peaceful habits.’ French ...”

“... for missionary activity, which greatly intensified in the 17th century. Pioneers such as the Dutch Thomas Erpenius and Jacob Golius – with the help of native speakers, usually Arab-speaking Christians from North Africa – learned Arabic and produced the first usable grammars and dictionaries. In the generation that followed, an enormous amount of work was ...”

“... on the British public was remarkable. There were those who wondered at Geller’s supernatural powers, and those again who merely wondered about them. John Taylor, professor of mathematics at London University, did both by turns. Taylor is an empiricist. Not for him the argument from good form or the lack of it, but rather the argument from galvanometers ...”

“... run over by Stephenson’s Rocket at the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester railway in 1830. Thomas Love Peacock, who found a pleasant berth at the India Board after writing Nightmare Abbey, began to investigate the possibilities of navigating the Euphrates from the Gulf to northern Syria – the India mail already went that way, but by land. James ...”

“... the handmaiden of politics and can play the game, in many cases, even better than the world powers. The Rwandan militia leader Bosco Ntaganda, known as the Terminator and wanted for his activities near a major goldmine in eastern Congo, was finally handed over for a cloak-and-dagger arrest by the ICC in Kigali in 2013. No voices in Africa could be heard ...”

“... villainy. 16 March. To St Etheldreda’s, Ely Place for the funeral of Anna Haycraft (aka Alice Thomas Ellis) who died a week or so ago in Wales and whose body had therefore to be brought down for the funeral and then presumably taken back to Wales to be buried beside Colin, her late husband, at their Welsh farmhouse. This, I gather, is pretty remote and ...”

“... annexation of Bosnia that year infuriated Serbian nationalists, who felt betrayed by the European powers and in particular by Russia, which allowed it to happen. In 1912-13, Serbia invaded Albania, to whose independence Austria was committed. Its soldiers murdered three hundred Gostivar Muslims and threw them into mass graves; hundreds more were killed in ...”

“... celebration of art’s ‘other means’, the poem ends up offering a complex enquiry into art’s powers of equivocation. It’s almost impossible to gauge the poem’s tone with any certainty. How ironic is this wistful harking back to the firm Johnsonian ideals of justice which ‘all reasonable beings’ would accept? Are we meant to condemn or to concur ...”

“... of which one is reminded by both Mordecai Richler’s anthology and Ernestine Schlant and Thomas Rimer’s collection of essays. There’s the fact, among many other examples, that US air bases on Japanese territory, acquired at the end of the Second World War, were used against Vietnam. There is the durability of Central European anti-semitism. And ...”