“... heavy pressure to do so. Metroland’s chief thruster was the railway company’s general manager, Robert Hope Selbie. His task, in Jackson’s words, was to see those unspoiled arcadias ‘comfortably populated, preferably with a high percentage of first-class season ticket-holders and their families. And if in making that possible the scenery should become ...”

“... with them an ‘essential sadness’ never to be surmounted. Exile, however positive its outcomes may seem for those countries generous or opportunistic enough to offer homes to top research scientists and famous writers, is not fun for most of those on whom it is visited. Indeed, extreme and even tragic suffering seems to have been the experience of huge ...”

“... Judith Shakespeare and, if so, on what grounds? The family has no record of any claims she may have made about its provenance; if she did believe it to be genuine, it is possible that this belief was communicated to her by spirit guides tapping on tables. It might be more apt, though, to imagine Corelli conferring this name on the girl with the pear as ...”

“... artistic sensibility he comes closest to the German Romantics: perhaps most of all to the composer Robert Schumann, born just a year after Poe, whose fantasy pieces – inconclusive, fragmentary, whimsical and haunting – Poe probably never heard. A novelist of Ackroyd’s talents could have anticipated the risk involved in starting at the end of his ...”

“... got it right: she had seen it all before under the microscope.In​ 1827, the Scottish botanist Robert Brown undertook an investigation into the pollen of Clarkia pulchella, a straggly plant with slender pale purple petals that splay out like chicken feet. Placing the pollen grains in water, he saw through the microscope that they were ‘very evidently in ...”

“... conceal her sense of herself as inadequate and, so, in ways that other, more successful people may have seemed to her to have eluded, transparently mortal. That was the reason we had such a powerful interdict against staring: the gaze was a reminder, even an affirmation, of the looked-at person’s mortality. This is the reason the king must not be looked ...”

“... In​ 2016, Theresa May told the Conservative Party Conference: ‘If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what the very word “citizenship” means.’ This characterisation was not – rightly not – considered antisemitic, merely an appeal to the autochthonic Brexiter mentality ...”

“... the caterpillar feet Of these predictions lead nowhere, It is necessary to understand That a poet may not exist, that his writings Are the incomplete circle and straight drop Of a question mark ... In the 18th century Paley deduced the reality of God from a watch: Malley, who, Ethel reports approvingly, ‘made a fair amount of money repairing watches’, is ...”

“... pedantic Theorists ... I see no use however in attempting to Frenchify the English nation, and you may be quite sure that the English Nation will not consent to be Frenchified.’ On the face of it, nothing could better exemplify the opposition between steam-driven, market-led, up-to-the-minute commercial principles, purporting to be based on universal laws ...”

“... both British Rail and the hotel industry. Those with established reputations, such as Dr Hutton, may be successful in obtaining support for this task, but how many books are simply not being written because their potential authors cannot afford the costs entailed? Logically, if not formally, this book divides into two parts, one dealing with the fall of ...”

“... career. The two concepts serve in different ways to assert a high standard of social democracy. Robert Anderson’s Education and Opportunity in Victorian Scotland does not destroy these beliefs, but he shows that the latter one was true only in a very limited state, and that many people were determined to keep it limited. The 19th-century middle class was ...”

“... of history to a vassal of economics. The two most famous works in this genre were both written by Robert Fogel, who was thus established as midwife and guru, entrepreneur and high priest, of this new cult. The first, Railroads and American Economic Growth, was an audaciously-conceived study which cut the iron horse so emphatically down to size, by exploring a ...”

“... in their acceptance of necessary descriptive duties. The result is that, line by line, she may be as anonymous, as manifold or, better, as mistakeable as a great poet gets. Other poets are predictably and more or less unvaryingly themselves, like cellophane packs of cigarettes from a vending machine; with Bishop you get the surprise gift in a plastic ...”

“... is difficult. ‘No one can ever be himself in this land,’ says the shadowy figure who may or may not be responsible for the double murder that closes The Black Book (Kara Kitap, 1990; translated in 1994). ‘In the land of the defeated and oppressed, to be is to be someone else. I am someone else; therefore I ...”

“... are not good things to be. Again, the key is Tolstoy (and Shakespeare). Power and sincerity may be concepts which most criticism and many hundreds of writers have venerated, yet as far as Bayley is concerned, Tolstoy’s easy epic power reveals how unnaturally most writers employ them: ‘powerful’ and ‘sincere’ work is likely to be willed ...”