“... and down-to-earth witticisms: he notices Lincoln’s almost physical need for laughter. In his self-restraint, Gore Vidal does not even make a great scene of the killing. The rage of Lincoln’s adherents has been vividly described by Walt Whitman, with the cry of ‘Murder!’ ringing through the playhouse, the white-faced widow shouting in her box, the ...”

“... many of you have no doubt stood in the amphitheatre at Ostia, marvelling,’ declaims Mark in self-parody, for his sermons are always pitched over the heads of his parishioners. Sister Dew, eagerly scrambling upwards to test the acoustics, falls and has to be tended by Edwin. ‘In his veterinary practice he specialised in the treatment of small ...”

“... when ‘each church recognised the catholicity and independence of the other.’ No easy matter. Robert Runcie, the Archbishop of Canterbury, writes in Old Catholics and Anglicans about the difficulty of trying to be both catholic and independent. But that is what Baxter claimed to be – and thought the Church of England should be. N.H. Keeble has ...”

“... is well-known. A few belong to both categories; those in the second include Leonardo da Vinci, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo; others, however, are nonentities. The temptation to dismiss the list out of hand is, as the authors agree, almost irresistible. They have, however, succeeded in establishing to their satisfaction that, apart from the ...”

“... at how lightly Mrs Thatcher and her cabinet of yes-men have got off. But then the Eye’s current self-image – of stout, no-nonsense, undeceivable conservative Englishness – isn’t so very far away from that of the Prime Minister herself. In a couple of years’ time, no doubt, the magazine will open its own wine club, and then we shall all know exactly ...”

“... also finely verbal. Burrows’s commentary on the diagram wittily sums up his findings: Chiefly in self-gratifying anecdotes, Lydia uses ‘was’ at eight times as high a rate as Collins. With his honoured patroness ever foremost in his talk, if not quite foremost in his mind, Collins uses ‘her’ at almost eight times as high a rate as Lydia, who has ...”

“... on to describe Shakespeare’s Dream as, in effect, performing a function analogous to that of Robert Bly’s ‘men’s movement’: the male anxieties revealed by Foreman and de Maisse about being ruled by this dubiously sexy old woman are imaginatively soothed through the conquest of the Amazon queen, Hippolyta, and the erotic humiliation of the fairy ...”

“... of her in London, represented in For Love Alone, brought back an adolescent sense of failure and self-loathing. She punished herself, walked everywhere to the point of exhaustion, and wanted to die. One of the illuminating sidelights in this biography is the brief account of Rowley’s 1987 visit to the Helping Hand Home in Adelaide to hear retired Professor ...”

“... and concerns of the near-nonsensical Cave of Spleen episode in The Rape of the Lock. The fact that Robert Southey wrote enthusiastically about Taylor in his Lives and Works of the Uneducated Poets (1831) doesn’t do much to establish the Water-Poet as an unacknowledged influence either; although he does briefly quote from Sir Gregory Nonsence, Southey is ...”

“... never left the drawing board. The Dyna-Soar was cancelled in 1963 by the then defence secretary, Robert McNamara. But the dream never died, lingering on in obscure budgetary allocations over ensuing decades, none of them yielding anything of practical use. Despite the bombast on both sides of what we have to call the New Cold War, current efforts will almost ...”

“... the Arno ‘for the umpteenth time’. What she wants to grasp is the moment that her 17-year-old self understood that you don’t have to decide – you don’t have to do something, you don’t have to slip into plot. You can throw postcards into the river in a gesture that says: ‘I toss it all up into the air. I want it, but I don’t want it ...”

“... became a byword for audience appeal and recognition. In The Hog Hath Lost His Pearl (c.1613-14), Robert Taylor speculates, ‘And if [this play] prove so happy as to please,/We’ll say ’tis fortunate, like Pericles’; and 25 years later Pericles was still immediately recognisable in James Shirley’s sledgehammer puns in Arcadia (1640): ‘Tire me? I am ...”

“... adrift with her two children, evoked in the wastes of Aftermath. The memoir was criticised for self-pity: here anger has taken up all the space where pity might cling on. The production – and the text – set aside the restless to and fro debate and shared anguish about the depths of human suffering and especially women’s sufferings that keeps ...”

“... and made contact with the American counterintelligence corps (forerunner of the CIA): his brother Robert had bills of lading which proved that the Russians were stripping East German factories and sending materials back to the Soviet Union. In 1948, on a trip home to Rostock, Kempowski was arrested by the NKVD and charged with espionage. The experience is ...”

“... consequences such ‘small special points’ might have. As he wrote in the characteristically self-effacing preface, ‘the subject may appear an insignificant one, but we shall see that it possesses some interest; and the maxim de minimis non curat lex [‘the law does not concern itself with trifles’] does not apply to science.’ Nor does it apply to ...”