“... publication is as yet only partially complete. The first six volumes take us as far as 1804 (it took Grieg two to cover the same span); at the present rate of production – two volumes per half year – the full text should be available by the end of 1981. The editors have decided, partly because of financial considerations, not to append notes or an index ...”

“... You’re smiling; you’re wincing; but still a last gasp in you recalls the pleasure you once took in finding out who wins. Envelope-itis. Are we kidding? After four months of the ‘awards season’, reaching from the tarnished Golden Globes to the diligent film critics’ circles in provincial cities (there are a hundred schemes of ...”

“... the impression McEwen made in his life. He was born into a Scottish gentry family, the son of Sir John McEwen, Conservative under-secretary of state for Scotland, and his wife, Brigid Lindley. Rory and his five brothers and one sister grew up in Berwickshire in the family’s Palladian mansion, Marchmont. Commenting later on his interest in Redouté, he wrote ...”

“... a dust-sheet over her first husband. Miss Edwards excellently takes it off. The second husband, John Marsh, was an advertising copywriter and a PR man. He read her epic carefully and, among many other things, took out the dashes. Gone with the Wind was written in a peculiar manner. It is, of course, very long, but epics ...”

“... Wilson’. The likes of, eh? Still, this helps introduce a rather interesting section on Tate, John Crowe Ransom and the so-called Southern Agrarians. Tate, who was more or less openly nostalgic for the Old Confederacy, half-adopted ‘Caliban’ Lowell and had him to stay in his ramshackle home, Benfolly in Tennessee. It’s clear that his long ...”

“... known stronghold.In 1858, two English ornithologists went to see the great auk for themselves. John Wolley and Alfred Newton travelled to the south-west peninsula of Iceland, hoping to visit Eldey and return with some specimens to add to their collections. Newton even dreamed of capturing a live auk for London Zoo. But their trip was a failure. Bad weather ...”

“... a Jewish manufacturing family called the Oppermanns; not Anthony Trollope, or Anthony Powell, or John Galsworthy, whose writing desk was purchased by Gabriele Tergit for the karmic storage of her manuscripts. These are books that have a strong narrative beat and keep you turning the pages by virtue of speed, coverage and pressure of events. The Effingers ...”

“... are used throughout the book) are both dated and revealing. Egyptian resistance took many forms, and the country wasn’t handed independence, but won it in the face of censorship, martial law, and the imprisonment and exile of many of its leaders.Most histories of Egyptology begin in earnest in July 1798, with the arrival at Alexandria of ...”

“... digression, exposition, all done with stylish dispatch, admirably rendered by the translator, John Howe. Closer to a looped sequence of essays than a memoir, the book nonetheless shows off the memoirist’s skill to stunning effect in three somewhat unflattering portraits – Castro, Guevara and Mitterrand – and reminds us that distance and disloyalty ...”

“... and Christian orthodoxies informed early modern attitudes, so that the devoutly Protestant John Locke could assert on both counts that ‘labour for labour’s sake is against nature.’ There would be no work in heaven. But then in the second half of his chapter, on ‘the rewards of labour’, Thomas inverts this picture, tracing ‘the rudiments of ...”

“... Beneath their plain and practical exteriors, Secord suggests, the new scientific bestsellers took on some of the roles of fiction and advice literature, creating a new class of self-fashioning consumers and orienting them in a rapidly changing world. Just as the Reform Act was regarded by some campaigners as a historic victory and by others as a shameful ...”

“... situation now is very different. At the age of 78, and with the possible exception of John Adams, Glass can be regarded as the most famous – certainly the most successful – of all the composers who emerged from the minimalist revolution of the 1960s. Perhaps because he shed the technical apparatus of such iconic pieces as Reich’s Drumming ...”

“... When​ the 22-year-old Charles Darwin joined HMS Beagle in 1831 he took a copy of Paradise Lost with him, and over the next five years he read it many times, in Brazil, Patagonia, Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia and Mauritius. As the ship’s naturalist he sent commentaries and specimens back to colleagues in London, who soon came to see him not as a dilettante but an extremely acute observer ...”

“... back pages are going to be well-thumbed. ‘Hi, Craig,’ see page 752, you ‘mad sod’; ‘Hi, John,’ see page 563, you ‘arse-faced trendy’; ‘Hi, David,’ see page 266, you ‘deaf cunt’, and so on. Less succinct salutations will be discovered by the likes of Donald Davie (‘droning out his tosh’), Ted Hughes (‘boring old monolith, no good ...”

“... principles were more influential than his practice. Although his short memoir of his friend John Sterling is counted as a minor classic of biography, his much more elaborate life of Cromwell, not to say his interminable History of Frederick the Great, has never been shortlisted among the world’s greatest examples of the art. But Carlyle possessed one ...”