“... the falling Oscar distributed upon them, they would have remained in obscurity. Brian Roberts may well have stumbled upon them by accident. Four of his previous biographies have been set, wholly or partly, in Africa; perhaps it was while he was examining the records of Zululand in 1881 that he came across a most improbable figure, Lady Florence Dixie, a ...”

“... Division has been Scotland’s arch-fiend and has always stood on “doctrinal purity”. It may be that we are like that and therefore any hope of our ever misgoverning ourselves may mercifully never be realised.’ The wry note in that last sentence wouldn’t have endeared him to the likes of MacDiarmid, and it must ...”

“... dialect poems are plainly superior to his poems in Standard English, much as Burns in Scots is, we may well think, better and more authentic than Burns in English. One who made the comparison with Burns was Gerard Manley Hopkins, writing in 1879 to Robert Bridges. Of Barnes’s dialect poems Hopkins says: ‘A proof of their excellence is that you ...”

“... other great painters succeed. No painter can do everything. But the source of Rubens’s failures may also be the source of his unparalleled energy, charm and inventiveness.Take the way he paints Jesus’ dead body as it is taken down from the cross. His greatest version of this subject is in Antwerp, but there are two others in the big Rubens exhibition at ...”

“... your personality on the stuff you use to represent the world were sacrilegious.But the change may in fact have been due to Vermeer starting to use an optical device – a camera obscura perhaps. To my eye a picture like the The Art of Painting is as good evidence that he did so as anything short of documentary proof could be. The spread-out points of ...”

“... and Noah Baumbach), a character makes a horrible discovery about reality: it keeps changing. This may seem obvious and is only part of the truth anyway. One of reality’s other problems is that it doesn’t change enough. But we understand the horror.If we had been born into a place designed to exclude change and many other inconveniences, a place where we ...”

“... she wants to fight, but only in the way her father and Joan of Arc fought. They both laugh. As we may or may not have worked out by this stage, the little girl grows up to become our adult heroine, the woman we have already seen on her deathbed in the film’s second scene. Soon after that a hand closes her eyes. The hand ...”

“... in the majority of cases. Talk of ‘default’ mistakes the nature of the loans: graduates may eventually have their balances cleared by the government, but that doesn’t mean they have defaulted on the terms of repayment. The initial estimate was that fewer than 40 per cent of borrowers were expected to clear their accounts. The IFS now estimates ...”

“... In the chapter in The Prince on the savage Syracusan tyrant Agathocles, he says that cruelty may be well or ill matched to its end, ‘se del male è licito dire bene’ – if it’s OK to talk ‘well’ of evil. Macaulay thought that the Pistola manuscript, a morbid account in Machiavelli’s hand of the Florentine plague of 1523, could not have been ...”

“... thereanent.’ Lear’s nonsense is full of mistakes that both the characters and their creator may or may not want to make, and Jenny Uglow’s absorbing new biography brings to the fore the question of the relation of his creativity to the accidence of his experience. In his diaries Lear often quotes or invokes his ...”

“... questions, have only recently begun to be studied in detail, despite the fact that all of these may have far-reaching consequences for the nature of the OED documentation and, of course, for any conclusions based upon it. Schäfer chooses to examine just one aspect of OED policy: the accuracy of the dates given for the first use of a word. He reread a ...”

“... on paleographic grounds this is assigned to the seventh or eighth century. The cross itself may be older – not as old as St Thomas, as the relics claim to be, but very beautiful and austere. What this unexpected extension of the Thomas story produced in me was not any access of religious feeling but an intense biographical curiosity. His Indian ...”

“... because the word connotes anachronistic misogyny. This girl – sorry, woman – is sexist, you may have thought as soon as you saw my usage. Well, I’m not. These critics aren’t hysterical because they have uncontrollable, misunderstood responses to social problems; they perform hysteria because they know their audience respects the existence of those ...”

“... the writer’s struggles is accompanied by indifference to the reader’s – an indifference that may border on hostility. Armand’s son, present from the beginning of the book, is given a name only on its penultimate page, as if to advertise the arbitrariness of its previous omission and to reveal something that became detectable rather earlier – an ...”

“... of all parts of the sea is linked. What happens to a diatom in the upper, sunlit strata of the sea may well determine what happens to a cod lying on the ledge of some rocky canyon a hundred fathoms below, or to a bed of multicoloured, gorgeously plumed sea worms carpeting an underlying shoal, or to a prawn creeping over the soft oozes of the sea floor in the ...”