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“... had a bad stammer, and his puns were delivered with effort, after a period of voiceless struggle. John Clare described him approaching ‘a joke or a pun with an inward sort of utterance ere he can give it speech till his tongue becomes a sort of Packmans strop turning it over and over till at last it comes out wetted as keen as a razor.’ De Quincey ...”

“... proffered solutions of two apparently very different kinds. One, advanced by Lord Woolf and Sir John Laws, is based on a fresh paradigm of constitutional law – fresh at least in this country, though familiar elsewhere. It looks beyond the Diceyan datum line of a supreme and unchallengeable Parliament and asks where a Parliament derives its authority to ...”

“... With nearly three hundred pages to 70 in Ricks, Shatto can afford a more spacious introduction and fuller annotation, complete collations and bibliographical descriptions of the numerous manuscripts and printed texts, and a list of minor variants running to 36 pages. The 1837 text of ‘Oh! that ’twere possible’, published in The Tribute, is given ...”

“... who wrote ‘Things are in the saddle/And ride mankind.’ The treatment of Whitman is much fuller, nearly fifty pages when you count them up, spread over several chapters: more space than is given to any other artist. Fisher writes here as an admirer. He has a familiar knowledge of the poetry, and finds good places to pause and reflect, a skill that ...”

“... they belong to one real world’ by introducing her to his London circle, the reality test failed. John Hayward dismissed Eliot’s ‘cousin’ as a ‘grim, prim, school-ma’amish female’; Ottoline Morrell called her that ‘awful American Woman’; for Virginia Woolf she was a ‘dull impeccable Bostonian’, a ‘rich American snob lady’. Eliot’s ...”

“... editions, the last authorised one. Some textual variants are recorded in the notes (Oxford gives a fuller selection; Ohio endeavours to supply a complete record). The Longman text therefore has historical interest, though Browning’s revisions were, it seems to me, generally improvements. Still, since none of the poems in this volume was altered ...”

“... episode as a ‘deflation’ (and deflation is a truer description than parody, which implies a fuller commitment to mimicry than Johnson was prepared to enter into). A process of flattening, even of de-exoticising, is visible in most of Johnson’s oriental exercises. In Rambler No 38 (1750), ‘The advantages of mediocrity [i.e. against excess]. An ...”

“... stuck with the Officials, most of Adams’s close relatives opted for the Provisionals. But a fuller discussion of the various and sometimes contradictory accounts of Adams at this time would have given O’Doherty a chance to discuss one of the key issues in any assessment of Adams’s character: is he more vain and ambitious than principled? Or is it ...”

“... officer.‘In the Flesh’ wasn’t much politer, but it was slower and more soulful, with a fuller, more Ronettes-ish sound to it, and actually featured Ellie Greenwich, the great 1960s girl-group songwriter, on backing vocals. This was often the way it went with a Blondie song: you could hear it as sweet, you could hear it as sarcastic, or you could ...”

“... joining the company. But ‘Mrs K says defunutely: Nyet.’ The dance critics Arnold Haskell and John Martin denounced his ‘tragic’ mistake, his lamentable disloyalty. An article appeared in Izvestia under the name of Serge Lifar, the same Lifar who had awarded Nureyev the Nijinsky Prize: ‘He has become a star by sheer virtue of the fact that he is a ...”

“... to the ideas that were turning that world upside down. This is the Irvine of the novelist John Galt, who was born at a house in the High Street in 1779. He was the son of a sea-captain, and he didn’t keep well, but as a child he scurried around this changing locality, chasing the world that was going, and greeting the new one coming in. His ...”

“... 1743, Anna Letitia Aikin was the product of a distinguished Unitarian background, the daughter of John Aikin, a revered teacher at the Warrington Academy. The academy was effectively the leading university for those dissenters who had enough money to get an education but who were forbidden by law to take degrees at Oxford or Cambridge. Although, like all such ...”

“... existence under such titles as ‘Is Life Worth Living?’ and ‘What Makes a Life Significant’.John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle’s book is an anthology of these writings, from a letter James wrote when at Harvard Medical School in the 1860s to ‘A Pluralistic Mystic’, an argument against rationalising away mystical experiences that was published in ...”

“... ship was put back on an even keel. Curiously, although the Grosart debacle, fully documented in John Bicknell’s edition of Stephen’s letters, is briefly mentioned in Alan Bell’s exemplary entry on Stephen in the ODNB, these misdemeanours make no appearance in Arthur Sherbo’s entry on Grosart. Thereafter, the DNB maintained its announced schedule ...”

“... now. So it is that we learn that as an actor Shakespeare played Old Hamlet, Adam, Friar Laurence, John of Gaunt, Henry IV, Egeon and Duncan, but then again perhaps he didn’t, since all we have in support of this claim is a late rumour and some unverifiable computer analysis. Shakespeare’s will seems to confirm a well-established estrangement from not just ...”