“... that ‘in an incautious moment’ he had promised his young wife that he would produce ‘one more collage, a book no less, on the topic of reality’. He stopped work in November 1993 when he became ill, and died soon afterwards, at the age of seventy. So now we have even more of a collage than he intended. Half the ...”

“... novel, a magnificently successful writer pays homage to a far greater one who sometimes sold no more than twenty copies of a book, and in doing so enacts his own ritual of reparation. Author, Author snatches victory from James’s own defeat, bringing his thankless labours to a long-delayed fruition. For James himself, triumph and defeat were always sides ...”

“... was the sweeter for involving the frustration of an English competitor, the grouchy polymath Thomas Young – to whom much of the credit goes, on the other hand, for having cracked the cursive script. Young had the advantage of being able to go along to Bloomsbury should he feel the need to take another look at the Stone, whereas Champollion had to work ...”

“... a touch-screen and other familiar functions: web browser, camera, MP3 player. Apple shares went up more than 8 per cent that day, though the phones won’t be released until June, will sell for between $499 and $599, and hadn’t been independently tested. In January’s issue of Scientific American, Bill Gates predicted ‘a future in which robotic devices ...”

“... Great events cast shadows over details which in an undramatic year, or season, can be more clearly seen. Alethea Hayter’s A Sultry Month, published in 1965, was one of the earliest and best examples of what has become a popular genre. Set in another heatwave, in June 1846, Hayter’s account weaves together the lives of the famous, the obscure ...”

“... bars populated by sadomasochists. In this ‘wonderful world’, ‘a lot of fucking means like more than three guys a week.’ Dustan was working as a magistrate when he contracted HIV at the age of 24. The idea of death suddenly consumed him – ‘every thought ceded to it,’ making him feel like ‘a dog’ and ‘a loaded gun’. He began writing as ...”

“... name, about a fair in a Lincolnshire market town. When it was performed in 1908 under the baton of Thomas Beecham, it got rave reviews: ‘Mr Delius sees poetry and sentiment,’ the Daily Telegraph wrote, where ‘to the conventional eye all is harshness and frivol … The result is a work of intense feeling, pregnant with rare emotion and serene ...”

“... as dynamic soaring, which has been studied by aerospace engineers in an effort to make drones more energy efficient. They mate monogamously and for life, after spending years practising elaborate courtship dances, but they only see their partner once every year or so, when they meet to produce a single egg. Until they’re old enough to breed, which can ...”

“... to see the place that supplied the stone and the mark the men made who quarried it seems much more evocative than the actual wall itself. Instead we buy a couple of George III country chairs very reasonably in an antique shop before going round the much larger antique centre in Philip Webb’s parish hall. 6 January. Papers full of Charles Kennedy ...”

“... seem musty, costumed, made-up. Anyone who finds his poems flat or prosaic might consider Edward Thomas’s defence of Robert Frost: ‘if his work were printed [as prose] it would have little in common with the kind of prose that runs to blank verse ... It is poetry because it is better than prose.’ A New Path to the Waterfall is poetry because it is ...”

“... disaster of Ira’s life seems beside the point; it is taking place on a stage far away. More immediate are the voices of the two ageing narrators as they reckon with the troubles of the past and with their own mortality. Where Ira’s story is seemingly inexorable in its lunge towards madness, the voices of the two eminently sane narrators establish ...”

“... plantation to be shared out between the dead man’s relatives.In 1834, Douglass’s new master, Thomas Auld, a mean ‘object of contempt’, believing his authority was being challenged by his insolent teenage slave, handed him over ‘to be broken’ by an overseer called Edward Covey. ‘Mr Covey succeeded in breaking me,’ Douglass wrote, ‘in ...”

“... a process quickened by the famine and emigration of the 1840s. At the same time, writers such as Thomas Moore and Samuel Ferguson were attempting to recover and absorb Gaelic literary tradition. Then, towards the end of the century, figures like Douglas Hyde and Yeats made the Celtic Revival, as it was called, a powerful cultural and political force. Their ...”

“... one of the very few contemporary philosophers who, like Brandom, have dared to write books of more than seven hundred pages, has even declared that the merit of a publication ‘must be great enough to outweigh the disservice done by its being published at all’. So the present book, billed as ‘an approachable introduction to the complex system that ...”

“... of expansive jests included, in 1618, a walk to Scotland with no money, a parody of Ben Jonson’s more famous trip of the same year, which led to his subscription-funded account of The Pennylesse Pilgrimage; or, the Moneylesse Perambulation of John Taylor, alias the Kings Majesties Water-Poet; How He TRAVAILED on Foot from London to Edenborough in ...”