“... and his latest book, like some of its predecessors, is as odd as it is learned. It begins, but by no means ends, with a minute enquiry into the expression in medias res. Horace observed that Homer, instead of starting his poem about the Trojan War from the beginning – ab ovo, Leda’s egg from which was hatched Helen of Troy – chose to rush his ...”

“... the mark of many long years in the making. A revised edition now appears with a new introduction by J.G. Hawkes. This account of the causes and effects of European potato-eating is also a history of poverty and of the manner in which the potato, ‘the root of misery’, helped to confine the poor within their poverty. Salaman describes the process as it ...”

“... song: heard sadly, but not Sad: they sing with solemnity, yet cheerfully, Contentedly, though one by one They die. One by one his white birds Falter, and fall, out of the sky. ‘Heard sadly, but not sad’ is one of Grigson’s unfinical precisions. Having got it right, as if at the first attempt, he lets it alone. The ...”

“... of them regularly fill the review columns of the Sunday papers. But the idea of the self may be less simple than naive readers imagine; the writer of an autobiography may be not so much expressing a self as creating one in the process of writing his book, a point made in these two new studies of autobiography. It was ...”

“... space before the pulpit during the whole time of divine service, and a sermon then and there to be preached against the crime of fornication and incest, and immediately after the sermon shall with an audible voice make this humble acknowledgment, repeating the same after the minister namely ‘I, Thomas Odam, do here before God acknowledge and confess ...”

“... themselves chose to present it, as the pathetic picture of two orphans of the storm, victimised by the hound Baldwin, the main facts on which it is based are widely known and the subject of little dispute. The authors, one of whom wrote the Duke’s autobiography and helped the Duchess with hers, can add much detail but little new basic knowledge, even ...”

“... I am beginning to recover from the effects of being knocked down in Old Compton Street by a motor-car. Now I can walk to the end of the road. The other day I made an excursion as far as Camden Town to have my hair cut. This left me a little tired but otherwise unharmed. I resolved on a more ambitious venture: nothing less than a journey to Oxford when I drove part of the way myself ...”

“... of the Ronsard sonnet that defeated Yeats: When you are old and lost in memory you might, seized by a sentimental fit, take down this book and blow the dust off it recalling: ‘Bosley was quite keen on me.’ What on earth were they looking for – Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin, Seamus Heaney and Charles Causley – that they should have rated Bosley’s ...”

“... court records – may contain bits and pieces of detailed material of this sort, they can never be fitted together into a single coherent whole. And it is no use guessing on the basis of analogy from present to past. ‘Conjectural history’ is a waste of time. This thesis seems to have been accepted on both sides. Between 1925 and 1965 the mutual ...”

“... which Leonardo was working on at the same time as the Anghiari mural, and some flakes of what may be red lacquer. This harvest of particles is microscopic but substantial – in the sense that these are substances rather than theories and conjectures. Renaissance artists had their own jealously guarded recipes for paints and glazes – Leonardo was famously ...”

“... an Uzbek taxi driver, exiled from his own country and caught up in a revolution (which seems to be in Egypt, though the local detail is deliberately non-specific and at times contradictory). But he also wants to tell us how he got hold of the story, how he’s constructing it, and why that’s a good idea. The action is set last year: ‘As you will ...”

“... led to its publication as a three-volume novel in October 1862, under the name M.E. Braddon. By December, Lady Audley’s Secret had gone through eight editions, and Braddon’s tale of false identities, desertion, detection, bigamy, blackmail, arson, madness and murder had brought her celebrity and become the template for a genre. ...”

“... if anyone had harassed the creature, well, they’d have been the one flensed. I happened to be passing through Oban en route to Mull so I joined the small group assembled behind the pizza parlour and public toilets on the pier. Fishing boats were tied up, and across the bay the island of Kerrera lay in the first spring sunshine. The whale had chosen a ...”

“... of plot and causality, which we could see going several different ways if we wanted to. The pieces by contrast are precise bits of visual and aural engineering, not a frame or sound out of place, even if we can’t be sure what their place is. Carruth is said to be working on a third ...”

“... him the subject of suspicion during the Terror, when he was denounced as a counter-revolutionary by a fellow artist Jean-Baptiste Wicar, and accused of making paintings that ‘dirty the walls of the Republic’. Forced to defend himself before the Société Populaire et Républicaine des Arts, Boilly was exonerated, largely due to his canny submission of a ...”