“... I read Slaughterhouse-Five right after Breakfast of Champions, and then, feeling I should be more methodical, picked up Vonnegut’s first book, Player Piano, and read his work in order, filling in the handful of library gaps with my pocket money at the Waldenbooks in my local mall. Later, I’d start a rock band and name it Ice-Nine, after the ...”

“... what at first appears a straightforward project: to trace the path followed by English law for more than a millennium in categorising, criminalising and penalising treasonable acts. They conclude that treason as a crime has had its day: ‘Today, dangers inherent in the prosecution of treason manifestly outweigh the advantages, and the absurdity of a ...”

“... According to the charter, ‘any attack on the sovereignty and territorial integrity of one or more contracted parties will be considered an aggression against the other parties.’ But there isn’t going to be a war, or at least not the Ecowas invasion of Niger that Tinubú was talking up in August. For one thing, it would have to be fought almost ...”

“... strange, but it reflects sophisticated evolutionary interplay. C0-operative breeding allows for more consistent protection of nests, reducing predation, and increases the resources chicks have access to, vastly improving chances of fledgling survival. The benefits are so great that, about 15 per cent of the time, anis will lay an egg in another group’s ...”

“... audience is a daunting prospect and few people have tried; the most successful, until now, was Thomas Keneally, whose novel Towards Asmara (1989), set in the guerrilla-held areas at the time of the liberation war, was a picaresque homage to the Eritrean people. Michela Wrong has attempted something different: an idiosyncratic, free-ranging history of ...”

“... of the nation in which the concerts have taken place almost uninterruptedly for a century and more. For the imperial Britain in which Henry Wood’s Proms began in the summer of 1895 was a very different place from the post-imperial Britain in which the BBC Proms have been performed in the summer of 2007, and this in turn helps explain why the Proms, like ...”

“... thought to have been named by Walter Scott after the song of that title by the Irish Romantic poet Thomas Moore. This was then the only place I knew of so named. Next came a beautiful lake at Killarney which turned out to be called the Meeting of the Waters; again, it’s believed, at Scott’s suggestion. I decided to start collecting these ‘meetings’, so ...”

“... Doolittle (H.D.), who was Bryher’s lover. Elizabeth Bishop, a favourite in later years, received more than two hundred, over a period of almost forty years. Faced with such abundance the editors have had to make severe choices, and have occasionally and understandably made cuts in letters they did include. On the whole they seem to have done their work ...”

“... Falkoff’s book led me to others. I didn’t think I could start writing until I had read a few more histories of hoarding (Stuff by Randy Frost and Gail Steketee, Clutter by Jennifer Howard) and books about the way to treat it (The Hoarding Handbook, CBT for Hoarding Disorder). I wanted to understand the allure of decluttering, so I bought The ...”

“... Miltonic; in later years, Robert Morehead transformed Dante into a second Spenser, while Thomas William Parsons made him out to be ‘stately and solemn’ in the manner of ‘Gray and Dryden’. T.S. Eliot’s essay of 1929 argues against such Anglocentric and Italocentric definitions, but only by ascribing even greater consistency and homogenising ...”

“... and for reasons unknown, had disappeared from the Earth, but his conjecture was widely rejected. Thomas Jefferson put forward the consensus view in 1781, in his Notes on the State of Virginia: ‘Such is the economy of nature, that no instance can be produced of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct; of her having formed any link ...”

“... As far as misery goes, it is modernism that made the difference. If the typical modernist novel is more realistic than realism, that is partly because it refuses to edify its readers with a happy ending. Since the dispirited can easily tip over into the disaffected, this, politically speaking, is not entirely prudent. Despondency, so the Victorians ...”

“... of other images that could equally well have been chosen as landing places, while thousands more that make no claim to be works of art still demand attention. The very persistence of art objects can seem a burden. Of a New Ireland mask Bell writes: ‘the mask, like the malanggans, New Ireland’s giant funerary complexes of carving, would probably on ...”

“... of philosophy, but of the Principles of Political Economy and The Elements of Politics; he was more than well connected: one sister married E.H. Benson, the future archbishop of Canterbury, another married the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Lord Rayleigh. Eleanor’s brother was the future prime minister Arthur Balfour. Sidgwick knew a great deal about the ...”

“... of intimacy with Bray. As he reflexively rounds off another letter to her: ‘Can think of nothing more of uninterest to say.’ No cliché is so stale, no metaphor so dead that Beckett can’t find a way to make it twitch: ‘My spirits, though they lack altitude, are far from extinguished.’ Setting his face against any modification of his short plays, he ...”