“... a shift in Mr Laurence’s romantic emphases: Greer Garson arrives; Leonard Bernstein departs. More interesting is the partial reversal of Mr Laurence’s estimate of Shaw’s criticism of Brahms. In 1960 he quoted Shaw’s remark that ‘Brahms is just like Tennyson, an extraordinary musician, with the brains of a third-rate, village policeman’, as ...”

“... and Pale Fire’s Kinbote. It is clear that by giving consent to Field, Nabokov intended to do a Thomas Hardy: that is, write his life through a docile secretary. Indeed, he told Field as much: ‘I wanted to see the thing. The first biography, no matter what comes after, casts a certain shadow on the others.’ As events proved, Nabokov misjudged his ...”

“... and still less about the history of poetic punctuation.’ Thanks to Lennard, we now know much more, and not only about the history. He is (there is one citation in the OED, 1871) an inaugurative ‘punctuationist’: ‘one who practises, studies or treats of punctuation’; and his blazing book constitutes a true tribute to the man who taught him, Dr ...”

“... to our generation she looked fat, so she went on a diet and lost weight. This gave her access to more fashionable clothes, but it also changed her relationship with her friends: they no longer assumed that she would be happy to do tedious things like being the designated driver. She heard herself referred to less often as ‘good old Katy’. People who have ...”

“... when Oz speaks to himself, about himself, for the first time in his long public career, he sounds more sincere than he ever has in interview or public discussion, where he always sounds worse than phoney. ‘Dear parents, dear Fania and Arie, it’s night now and I’m in my room/in Arad, alone.’ Then the direct address: ‘Dad you stand up,/stooped. Mother ...”

“... Irene Cooper Willis, by introducing her to Bertrand Russell. Ottoline decided Irene could be more usefully employed in providing Russell with children, but Irene, while happy to act as his research assistant, preferred not to stand between Russell and Ottoline at a time when their own volatile love affair was still in progress. A clever and confident ...”

“... conservatism, personal dynamism, creativity, religiousness and sexuality. After a series of more than four thousand tests, as well as observations and interviews with the twin pairs, Mistra scientists proposed that a huge number of personality traits previously thought to be influenced by environment and upbringing – such things as career ...”

“... of the business takes place in London. It is arguable that the development of this market, even more than the Big Bang of 1986, was the vital step that transformed London’s fortunes after the war. The creation of the eurobond market was Warburg’s most significant achievement, but the original source of his rise to fame was the introduction of the ...”

“... to understand his own failures and achievements in relation to his father’s. ‘I have thought more than once that perhaps I embarked on the entire boating enterprise simply to repeat his experience so that I could know him better – perhaps even, in a way, recover him after his death.’ He deliberately descends to the depths. ‘The things I believed ...”

“... the relation between the biography of philosophers, or indeed authors in general, and their work. Thomas Nagel, for instance, has suggested that they have practically nothing to do with one another. Philosophical work is autonomous: it stands on its own feet, and interpretation of it should be based on what it contains. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, on the other ...”

“... to achieve a judicious balance, of the sort that usually wins one enemies all around. It is more than a quarter of a century since Darwin published Britain, Egypt and the Middle East: Imperial Policy in the Aftermath of War, 1918-22 (1981); since then he has edited or co-edited two other works on the last days of the British Empire. After Tamerlane ...”

“... have argued) because print was disguising its own novelty in pursuit of credibility, but more simply because handwritten texts were the only available model. What else could a printed book look like apart from a manuscript book? It is also in all senses a big book, a tome for the lectern rather than the private study. The Royal edition consists of ...”

“... to Ashbery, rivalling the scope of hero-critics like Saintsbury or Curtius or Auerbach though more giddily adventurous than they were. A few years ago he was maintaining that the parts of the Old Testament attributed to J, the Yahwist (that is, the author who refers to God as Yahveh), were written by a woman at the decadent court of Rehoboam. It seems a ...”

“... the difficulty of even the most apparently simple lyrics. Victorian poetry, she contends, ‘asks more demanding and radical questions of its culture than other genres of the period, experimenting with forms and poetic language commensurate with this complexity’. Readers of Armstrong’s book will not always find it possible to distinguish the opacities of ...”

“... pigs, stands the funerary monument of Robert Burton. Already, it will be noticed, I am giving more information than is strictly necessary. My excuse must be that it is a habit I have caught from Burton himself. A schoolboy, asked to produce a review, is said to have written: ‘This book tells me more than I wish to ...”