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“... doesn’t remember. Oscar Wilde, the Brontës, Robert Louis Stevenson, Tennyson, George MacDonald, Charles Reade, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Louisa May Alcott, Wilkie Collins, Mary Braddon, Conan Doyle, Du Maurier, and plenty more. Her literary memory is a compendium of every syllabus in Victorian literature that could be contrived. Alice is the woman in ...”

“... and hopeless; T.E. Smith, whose wife and daughter both had affairs with the maverick statesman Charles Dilke. As in a painting by Frith, here is a canvas crowded with figures, representing the rich diversity of Victorian life and manners. Through the riot of detail Macleod detects patterns. That is not easily done with so large and various a body of ...”

“... and has little of the sympathy for the past which is the best protector of future needs. We must hope this does not happen at the Tate. The Gallery’s imminent division may be an appropriate moment to review the prehistory of the type of institution, or rather types of institution, which it embodies. This means looking back, not a hundred years but two ...”

“... Star Chamber was not averse to having unauthorised new houses pulled down. In the 1630s, during Charles I’s ‘personal rule’, two developments occurred. The better-known one was the building of Covent Garden, the first London square, erected under royal licence to the designs of the royal architect, Inigo Jones, and soon to set the model for the style ...”

“... as its poignant first words: ‘I am reaching an age when I had better collect the essays which I hope to preserve.’ There is the small accidental shock upon now meeting such innocent words as ‘She wanted to have no more bother,’ given that Empson came drily to relish as his own epitaph ‘No more bother.’ There is the resilience ...”

“... modern English history. Whether or not we call them ‘crises’, moments of heightened fear or hope invariably found poets in the front line of political agitation. In 1562-63, and again in 1579-81, there were the uncertainties over the succession and over Queen Elizabeth’s readiness, in addressing them, to put the nation’s interests before her own. In ...”

“... the field, she was sidelined and became impoverished. De la Beche painted Duria Antiquior in the hope of helping his friend out of her dire financial straits, and based the denizens of his ancient sea largely on the creatures whose remains she had uncovered in the fossil-rich limestone and shale of Lyme Regis. When the painting became a print, the image sold ...”

“... fairly close approximations, ascribing their discrepancies to ‘observational errors’. But, as Charles Sanders Peirce pointed out, this was simply a term of art: there was seldom any good reason to believe that there was anything wrong with the experiments. In his view, and in mine, the deviations were a matter of chance, and I follow him in taking chance ...”

“... been called ... the “least good” of the author’s books. If so, where to place Man’s Hope, Days of Wrath, and the post-Word War Two self-advertisements and hagiographies of General De Gaulle?’ For Lottman, the book is ‘a well-built narrative account of a revolutionary episode as it might have happened, with convincing personae who might ...”

“... mythical monster, the chimera (lion head, goat body, serpent tail) was evoked by the geneticist Charles Boklage to characterise the many ‘twins who are walking around in a single body’. These people, presumably, have recovered and incorporated their vanished twins, becoming atavisms of Plato’s undivided androgyne. Similarly, what Freud called the ...”

“... clearance and condominium building up alongside bank robbery and murder. His books do not offer hope. Right can only win in the short term. We are all guilty of existence and our sheer numbers make us enemies of the good green earth. Ben Elton dabbled in these waters in Stark, and, despite the jokes, there is no reason to believe that he or Hiaasen think ...”

“... print into plays and films almost since he was born in The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1920. Charles Laughton, Orson Welles, José Ferrer, Tony Randall and many others have brought him to some sort of audio or audio-visual life, but the relatively recent personifications by Albert Finney, Peter Ustinov and David Suchet dominate most memories. None of ...”

“... turn safely to the detective who now makes his appearance. This is a retired policeman played by Charles Vanel, and said to be the model for Peter Falk’s Columbo: he smokes a small cigar perpetually, pretends not to understand half of what he hears, and has a habit of popping up magically everywhere. He wears a dark old woollen coat, though, instead of the ...”

“... computer science and the intelligence industry outlined their various areas of expertise in the hope of making selective alliances as a way of getting ahead of the pack (COMPETITION IS A RACE). Among those present were representatives from Olson Zaltman Associates – a consulting firm that uses ‘metaphor elicitation’ to help global brands (clients ...”

“... the first shock’, Clairmont had ‘sustained her loss with more fortitude than I had dared to hope’. Shelley, too, was in better spirits, having taken possession of a sailing boat built for him at Genoa. ‘It cost me 80l.,’ he wrote to his friend John Gisborne in June, ‘and reduced me to some difficulty in point of money. However, it is swift and ...”