“... and to our evolutionary past. Aware of this, and acknowledging that, as the dictionary says, ‘a small percentage of the population appear to have such vivid imaginations that they can find it hard to distinguish between reality and illusion,’ should the rationalist who is confronted by alternative explanations for the world be steaming mad, mildly ...”

“... thinks lathes are for honing (‘Get out that fine lathe now to hone your verse’). But that’s small matter. Pound’s Homage has always been hammered by pedants for getting words wrong, but its main limitation is its very strong bias towards the later more programmatic and Maecenas-influenced Propertius. This turns drunkenly loving Cynthia into a ...”

“... the modern evolutionary synthesis, in which the theories of natural selection (which assumed small, continuous variations between organisms) and Mendelian inheritance (which initially postulated large, discontinuous variations) were seen as complementary. ‘Quantitative work shows clearly that natural selection is a reality,’ Haldane wrote in ...”

“... at Harvard. The ‘Harvard wits’, he called them. Schuyler had attended Bethany College, a small college in West Virginia affiliated with the Disciples of Christ, where he had devoted himself to bridge and then flunked out. The four poets became known as the ‘New York School’, a tag thought up by the gallery’s director, John Myers, who was ...”

“... to the painter Winifred, who stayed behind at their farmhouse in Cumbria to look after their two small children and new baby. At Happisburgh, where the other invited guests included Henry Moore and Ivon Hitchens, Hepworth and Nicholson swam in the sea, played cricket and discussed ideas for their work. Nicholson photographed Hepworth’s naked back and ...”

“... they had acquired from Lady Russell (the Bedford family owned much of Bloomsbury). It was quite small, already surrounded by houses, and longer from north to south than from east to west. James Gibbs, one of the surveyors appointed by the Commissioners (Hawksmoor was the other), submitted one plan, Vanbrugh another. The latter was on a north-south axis ...”

“... between sacrificing his daughter Iphigenia or abandoning the war to recover his brother’s wife, Helen. ‘Which of these is free from evil?’ he asks, in Oliver Taplin’s translation. Jeffrey Bernstein has the wordier ‘Which of these two ways is without evil?’ David Mulroy, the punchier ‘Can either choice be right?’ Agamemnon is in a position ...”

“... death. He has some regular correspondents and confidants – Robert Lachenay, his school friend, Helen Scott, who worked with him on the Hitchcock book, Annette Insdorf, who wrote a book about him – but also writes to friends at the Cahiers, to actors with whom he is working, to journalists requesting information, people who send him scripts, offer him ...”

“... ordinarily assumed to be contemptible has a long history, stretching back to Gorgias’s Eulogy of Helen; Erasmus transformed the tradition when he made Folly herself utter the speech in praise of folly, producing as he did so various paradoxes of self-reference. Burton, it might be said, in some degree follows the Erasmian lead in that, even as he offers an ...”

“... merely a collection of amiable grotesques; Phorkyas lends a grotesque element to the episode of Helen that is quite distinct from the medieval grotesqueries of the poem; the descent to the Mothers alone is enough to show that when Nietzsche wrote that Goethe did not understand the Greeks he himself failed to understand Goethe. Goethe’s prodigious effort ...”

“... done to herself? After Colin Dexter and John Thaw’s Inspector Morse, Ian Rankin’s Rebus and Helen Mirren’s Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect, Rachel raises the tradition of the alcoholic detective to a new level. The novel’s main protagonist spends most of her time on train journeys, with no purpose other than to keep up the pretence that she is still ...”

“... print of Rome, Open City he had purchased for a promised $25,000. It opened in February 1946 at a small moviehouse west of Times Square and played there for twenty months. ‘Recently,’ the film critic James Agee wrote in the Nation, ‘I saw a moving picture so much worth talking about that I am still unable to review it.’ (Agee himself had recently ...”

“... them to do so. For much of the 18th century, these were limited in number, comprising a handful of small, short-lived institutions. London’s first commercial showcase of contemporary art, organised in 1760 by a group calling itself the Present Artists, included work by Katharine Read and the future Academician Mary Moser; exhibitions held subsequently by two ...”

“... everyday life. The significant structures of fiction and of psychopathology seem close here. In my small tribulation, the oddity became normalised, but my normality became distinctly odder, perhaps more artistically patterned, in the process. Dwelling on it – which includes trying to describe it, as I have done – draws out meanings which may be latent in ...”

“... and the author was encouraged by its success to complete a Shakespearean trilogy. Since, as Helen Gardner says, ‘the facts that are clearly established’ about Shakespeare’s life ‘could be written by a neat writer on two sides of a postcard’ (LRB, Vol. 6, No 6), this represents a considerable feat of expansion – but no other kind of feat. At ...”