“... establish a very different relation between speaker and subject. At one level the use of his name may be taken as a straight-forward apostrophe or tribute, a ‘greeting addressed to him’. Such naming serves to summon up a presence which is sustained simply by the communal knowledge that Ponge is there. And there is a second kind of reference, also ...”

“... back, ‘Greetings from the famous son of a famous father,’ to which Dedalus responds: ‘Who may he be?’ Stephen, 46/41, walking along Sandy-mount Strand: Unwholesome sandflats waited to suck his treading soles, breathing upward sewage breath. Gabler changes the stop to a comma, and adds: ‘a pocket of seaweed smouldered in sea-fire under a midden ...”

“... already inspired. The consensus of Robin Hood studies as it has emerged in the past twenty years may be summarised as follows. First, as regards the legend: the earliest reference to ‘rymes of Robyn Hood’ is in the 1377 text of Langland’s Piers Plowman. By the early 15th century, references have become relatively abundant. The earliest extant Robin ...”

“... Yet, as has often been pointed out, the tone of this is equivocal: ‘incalculably diffusive’ may suggest an impressively far-reaching stretch for Dorothea’s influence, but it is a phrase instinct with doubt and the probability of that influence going largely unnoticed. ‘Unvisited tombs’ has a melancholy, even accusing ring when applied to the life ...”

“... drive on the Belorussian Front in 1944; taking Berlin and accepting the German surrender in May 1945. Zhukov was the man on the white horse who led the victory parade in Red Square. Such a popular and charismatic figure was not going to get by without having problems. Both in Stalin’s time and in Khrushchev’s, there were periods of demotion and ...”

“... of the older century to the anti-Jewish laws of the next seems pretty straight and we may remember that Madeleine Lévy, the granddaughter of Alfred Dreyfus, died in Auschwitz. Pétain himself, we learn in Proust among the Nations, personally intervened to make the provisions of the Statut des Juifs harsher. Rose also tells us that as late as ...”

“... face was presumably missing, they must be rather proud of their technology. The Navy Seals may have been using gear similar to the Robocop-style glasses the Brazilian police have developed in preparation for the 2014 World Cup. Fitted with a small camera that sees as far as 12 miles, the glasses can capture 400 images a second and compare them with a ...”

“... Sometimes​ you just have to think of England. It may be embarrassing, it may be awful, but it exists. Max Porter’s Lanny – his second novel – is partly about an idea of England. It’s set in an unnamed village, ‘fewer than fifty redbrick cottages’, within commuting distance of London, a place that is ‘a cruciform grid with the twin hearts of church and pub in the middle ...”

“... regard were diametrically opposite. Still, he got there first by some thirty years. And things may be different at Harvard. Those who know Pipes only as a hardliner during the Cold War heyday of the Reagan years may doubt his credentials as an iconoclast. But what else is one to call someone who invokes Lytton Strachey ...”

“... And, metaphor apart, a domino-effect is at work in the narrative. ‘If I have robbed you, may I be turned into a leper!’ says an old servant, dismissed for theft. Years later he returns for forgiveness, stricken with leprosy (all curses and prophecies come true in this book): mistaken for the ghost of another character, he provokes frightened ...”

“... had become extinct. He and Petrarch, who was the most influential of the 14th-century humanists, may both have found the same classical precedents for this view, in Columella’s book on agriculture or the younger Pliny’s letters. But Alberti drew on a wider range of classical sources. Christine Smith has argued that Lucretius, whom Petrarch never ...”

“... by hate. People love different things – and can end up hating each other because of it.Justice may not be what love looks like in public, but fandom might be. To be a fan is to renounce fairness or balance, and to open oneself up to joy, despair, triumphalism, indignation and absurdity. In sport, judges are (or are expected to be) dispassionate and ...”

“... What​ are the people in our lives really like – inside? Seeming and being may not be the same. Smiles may be false and vows of love insincere. Appearances are deceptive; you can’t tell a book by its cover; beauty is only skin deep. Yet, in ordinary circumstances, surfaces are all we have to go on ...”

“... men. Sturgeon was always willing to address what it meant to be a woman in power. Unlike Theresa May, she railed against the Daily Mail’s ‘Never mind Brexit, who won Legs-it!’ headline, and talked about her anxieties over the menopause. She continues to call attention to sexism in her memoir, though occasionally she seems to use it to protect herself ...”

“... on which Mr Martin Gilbert is working for his great biography of Churchill. Mr Carlton’s work may therefore be ‘interim’ for other reasons than the Thirty Year Rule. Nevertheless this is undoubtedly an important book, the first major and serious biography of someone who will certainly go down to history as a major and serious statesman. It was too ...”