“... The population is praised for puffing its way stoically through the shrieking pieties of King James I, whose pamphlet on the matter warned loyal subjects that it was ‘a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs’. The tendency of those in authority to show who’s in charge by issuing no-smoking ...”

“... figures who recreated modern writing were gay, or Irish, or Jewish: Melville, Whitman, Hopkins, James, Yeats, Kafka, Woolf, Joyce, Stein, Beckett, Mann, Proust, Gide, Firbank, Lorca, Cocteau, Auden, Forster, Cavafy. But he would have been slightly unsettled, I think, by the thought of the gay element in this list, and by the idea that in place of ...”

“... Thirty years later, when Eliot’s prestige and influence were at their zenith, John Peter, a Canadian academic, published an article in Essays in Criticism called ‘A New Interpretation of The Waste Land’. Peter argued that the poem was at heart an elegy that might be compared to Tennyson’s In ...”

“... animation on everything the poet saw and put into words. In a sense it was much the same for Henry James, that other great equivocator of the American literary scene, and always a great admirer of Whitman. James’s prose, even the late prose, is paradoxically as physical as Leaves of Grass, and in the same way. A kind of ...”

“... the ducking back and forth across the line into pastiche (there is, for example, a complete M. R. James-like ghost story) which makes, occasionally, for too-conscious artfulness. How Fred (son of the rectory) and Daisy (failed student nurse) get together and get on is not separate from other stories of 1912 – of how atomic physics was developing and of how ...”

“... fox was pretty and troublesome. I am glad to know, incidentally, of a lady who called her pet fox James after a (sweet-smelling) contributor to the London Review. A fox group, usually a dog fox and several related vixens, occupies a territory, which it hunts in and defends. Subordinate, non-breeding vixens help in the defence of the territory, and may spend ...”

“... At a New York cocktail party shortly after the war, a young and insecure physics postgraduate was heard to blurt out to a woman he had met there: ‘I just want to know what Truth is!’ This was Thomas Kuhn and what he meant was that specific truths such as those of physics mattered less to him than acquiring metaphysical knowledge of the nature of truth ...”

“... decision-making to the practical needs of the financial situation of the family’. Indeed, James Prichard devised the category of ‘moral insanity’ as a diagnosis (an ‘ambiguous modification of insanity’, he called it) expressly tailored to the needs of wealthy families keen to deprive relatives who were troublesome, but not insane by the usual ...”

“... No one reading James Davidson’s enormous and impassioned book, which barely acknowledges the existence, much less the vast numerical superiority, of Greek heterosexual society, would get the impression that Greek homoeroticism was anything less than the central principle determining the varied cultural patterns of all those obstinately independent and idiosyncratic city-states ...”

“... Esau sells his birthright (Erstgeburt) to Jacob for a dish of lentils (Linsengericht). In the King James version, the passage reads as follows:Then Jacob gave Esau bread and pottage of lentiles; and he did eat and drink, and rose up, and went his way: thus Esau despised his birthright.To illustrate the plight of industrial labour, Marx refashioned this ...”

“... of keeping the faith. Preeminently a man whose ‘disciples were among his best works’, as Sir James Mackintosh put it, he exerted a unique influence upon the Whig political world of the early 19th century – Palmerston and Russell among the grandees, Horner and Brougham among the men of talent who made the Edinburgh Review their instrument. Whatever else ...”

“... V. Prochnow Jr, with 65 entries by Prochnow senior; and in Quotations For Our Time, by Dr Laurence Peter (author of The Peter Principle), with 37 entries of his own. It’s not wholly a new conceit: even L. T. Hoyt, last century, was not so unjust to himself as to deny his own verses comparison with those of Tennyson and ...”

“... stories. Cather’s first novel, Alexander’s Bridge, was in the manner of her admired Henry James, but it did not please her, nor did it make any mark in the world of fiction. (Her earlier book of poetry, notable in no way, had been self-published.) At college and afterwards, she had written stories about pioneer life, but she saw no special value in ...”

“... for more than twenty years and last January wrote a loopy letter to this journal, blaming James Fenton and myself for once queering his pitch at the New Statesman. ‘Effete onanist’ was one of the things he said about me. About himself he wrote with even more feeling: ‘In those days, I had no revolutionary ideology to sustain me, nothing but a ...”

“... Revolution to the Civil War era, the picture became decidedly blurred, and Whiggery seemed to peter out. What was the connection between the two major upheavals of England’s so-called ‘century of revolutions’? How far was the Glorious Revolution of 1688 a consolidation of the gains of the chaotic English Revolution of the 1640s? The history of the ...”