“... Johnson’s account, the wilful refusal of optical amelioration was the prime cause of Swift’s self-isolation. ‘Having thus excluded conversation, and desisted from study, he had neither business nor amusement; for having by some ridiculous resolution or made vow, determined never to wear spectacles, he could make little use of books in his later ...”

“... against Schoenbaum’s apparent relativism is accompanied by a sense that if his more visibly self-conscious precursor erred, it was actually on the side of sentiment. On the few occasions when Honan finds reason to correct Schoenbaum (which he does with a quiet but clear satisfaction), it is always to extirpate some residual romantic indulgence. The ...”

“... to have forgotten most of what I thought I’d learned up to then’. Why such essentially vain self-criticism? And if Pynchon really does feel so deprecatory, if the collection is therefore of mostly historical value, then by what critical scruple did he choose to omit the only other story he has published, ‘Mortality and Mercy in ...”

“... and on the royal favourite Buckingham. There is only one article on a country other than England: Robert Harding’s ‘Aristocrats and Lawyers in French Provincial Government, 1559-1648’. William J. Bouwsma writes on ‘Anxiety and the Formation of Early Modern Culture’. His most interesting point is that the words ‘anxiety’ and ‘anxious’ entered ...”

“... into the 19th century – it seems to have been, like Blind Harry’s Wallace, something which no self-respecting Scots household was complete without. This popularity has caused modern scholars some perplexity. It is not that early readers of the poem knew something about it that we don’t, to judge from the parody of 1701 that Jack quotes, in which ...”

“... like at the end of his days.’ Charlie was probably shadowed a little by Beef, his gamely young self: he was no stranger to the world he lived in. But family life seemed to have him in its grip; it reformed him; it placed him in a new relation to his surroundings – he was a father, and a husband who loved his wife – and the old temptations must have ...”

“... the Daleks were made the subject of two big storylines in the relaunched Doctor Who. In the first, Robert Shearman’s ‘Dalek’, the last living representative of the race is tortured by American operatives in orange boilersuits at an underground facility; he falls in love with Rose, the new Doctor’s main assistant, and comes to understand his ...”

“... necessary for her to come into France . . . to raise the siege of Orléans . . . and to go to Robert de Beaudricourt in the town of Vaucouleurs, the captain of that place, that he would give her people to go with her.’ DeVries assigns priority to Joan’s experience of the ‘voice’, and suggests that ‘Burgundian troops’ burned the church at ...”

“... He could have been charged with malicious wounding and attempted murder – true, he could plead self-defence, but such a plea from an illegitimate idle vagrant who had stabbed a gentleman would hardly have been listened to at Bow Street. He was also guilty of what the Enquiry calls ‘a high Offence against the Public Good’ for failing to initiate a ...”

“... was an object of suspicion. Over the following years, as he repositioned himself more securely in Robert Walpole’s England, he and Burlington, ‘the architect Earl’, with the gardener William Kent formed the heart of a coterie that made landscape design into an art form with rules, conventions and, for those with eyes to see, quite distinct ...”

“... threw his stories together from whatever sources came to hand but agree that he was opportunistic, self-justifying and, in political matters, accident-prone even for a man moving through a landscape littered with banana skins. In a long interview he gave to Numa Sadoul in 1971, then spent three years revising, Hergé said: ‘My childhood, my adolescence, Boy ...”

“... Roundhouse, the former engine-turning shed. Stuart Montgomery, the publisher of Gunslinger (and of Robert Duncan, Gary Snyder, Basil Bunting, David Jones and Roy Fisher), a wispy-moustached medical man with a significant hobby, decided to do something about the sluggishness and indolence of mainstream critics. He flew off to Las Vegas and took a cab to the ...”

“... script realised in film, the skiing drama Downhill Racer, directed by Michael Ritchie and starring Robert Redford. Solo Faces is the story of a rock-climbing drifter and his friend and rival and their pursuit of glory through heroic feats on the mountain. In the earlier A Sport and a Pastime, the quarry, the struggled for peak, is perfect sexual love, though ...”

“... so ‘hysterically discreet’ that he got married by proxy; who, in the words of the writer Robert Neumann, ‘spent his life on the run. From the Great War to Switzerland. From the symbolic firing-squad across the Channel. From Blitzed London to the safety of provincial Bath. From Hitler’s threatened invasion of England to the USA. From Roosevelt’s ...”

“... know enough about foreigners to be able to tell if they were whom they claimed to be. Moreover, as Robert Service reminds us in Spies and Commissars, in the first, formative years after the Bolshevik Revolution, when almost all the capitalist powers sent military forces to support the Bolsheviks’ opponents in the Civil War, most of the resident ...”