“... V. Prochnow Jr, with 65 entries by Prochnow senior; and in Quotations For Our Time, by Dr Laurence Peter (author of The Peter Principle), with 37 entries of his own. It’s not wholly a new conceit: even L. T. Hoyt, last century, was not so unjust to himself as to deny his own verses comparison with those of Tennyson and ...”

“... stories. Cather’s first novel, Alexander’s Bridge, was in the manner of her admired Henry James, but it did not please her, nor did it make any mark in the world of fiction. (Her earlier book of poetry, notable in no way, had been self-published.) At college and afterwards, she had written stories about pioneer life, but she saw no special value in ...”

“... for more than twenty years and last January wrote a loopy letter to this journal, blaming James Fenton and myself for once queering his pitch at the New Statesman. ‘Effete onanist’ was one of the things he said about me. About himself he wrote with even more feeling: ‘In those days, I had no revolutionary ideology to sustain me, nothing but a ...”

“... of account should be given of the shaping of the conditions of life by life itself? In the 1970s James Lovelock, independent scientist and inventor, proposed the Gaia hypothesis. He argued that the Earth regulates itself, and responds to change, in the same sort of way that a single living organism does. The Earth acts to keep itself alive. Lovelock’s new ...”

“... Revolution to the Civil War era, the picture became decidedly blurred, and Whiggery seemed to peter out. What was the connection between the two major upheavals of England’s so-called ‘century of revolutions’? How far was the Glorious Revolution of 1688 a consolidation of the gains of the chaotic English Revolution of the 1640s? The history of the ...”

“... In​ 1972, the architects Alison and Peter Smithson completed Robin Hood Gardens, their only council estate. The couple were famous for projects such as the Mies van der Rohe-inspired Hunstanton School (1954) in Norfolk; the three chamfered, stone-clad towers of the Economist Building (1959-65) in Piccadilly; and the timber-screened Garden Building (1967-70) at St Hilda’s College, Oxford ...”

“... History of Blacks in Britain was held in the same year, at the University of London. Studies by Peter Fryer, James Walvin and David Dabydeen appeared in the next few years. Fryer, whose Staying Power is still the most detailed – and most often consulted – account of the subject, gave more than two hundred talks and ...”

“... place in church because it put her next to someone with ‘a strong breath’. The chaplain to James I’s wife, Queen Anne, held that of ‘all the noisome scents, there is none so rammish and so intolerable as that which proceeds from man’s body … I will not speak of his filth issuing from his eares, his eyes, nostrils, mouth, navel, and the uncleane ...”

“... caused an outburst of public indignation in Britain. When it emerged that the Home Secretary, Sir James Graham, had authorised the opening of Mazzini’s correspondence, he was attacked in Parliament for resorting to ‘the spy system of foreign states’ and Carlyle wrote to the Times that opening of men’s letters was ‘a practice near of kin to picking ...”

“... reading matter, the titles she was happy to display. Alan Bennett’s Diaries and, of course, Peter Ackroyd’s gold-brick biography of Blake. Bennett, Ackroyd and Jonathan Miller – these were the figures who mattered most. The Christmas parcels of English literature. Enough of threadbare bohemia, paranoid narcissism, chemical tourism through the Third ...”

“... even lowering the lane outside his house to protect himself from view. It’s a subject that James Moore has made particularly his own, providing the definitive account of Darwin’s fears, phobias and life options in his lynchpin essay in The Darwinian Heritage. The Darwinian Heritage is a richly-detailed volume, daunting in size. It contains 31 ...”

“... to the apex of the huge new temple of Zeus at Olympia itself, the closest thing to a pagan St Peter’s: a gilded Victory stood on a shield, with an inscription, since rediscovered, commemorating the battle. The Athenians must have bristled at the fact that a monument of their military humiliation was on display for eternity in just about the most ...”

“... They have hung there since 1756, when the bishop of Durham acquired them from the estate of James Mendez, a Jewish merchant of Portuguese descent. Mendez bought them from William Chapman in 1720, just after the collapse of the South Sea Company, in which Chapman was a shareholder. How and when the paintings arrived in Britain isn’t known, but by the ...”

“... Robert Montgomery during Chandler’s lifetime, and afterwards by Elliot Gould, Robert Mitchum and James Garner. He was the hero of the most listened to radio detective serial in history, and, by the time Chandler died in 1959, had sold over five million books. The private eye was the wilderness hero moved to the urban frontier, alone and unattached, living ...”

“... and egalitarian refusal to be impressed. But since our only national cult is the Royal Family, James Agate’s less flattering verdict may also be more appropriate: ‘The English instinctively admire any man who has no talent and is modest about it.’ Other nations’ great men, however, are a different matter. Perhaps because Napoleon was born on one ...”