“... is paid in a festschrift, is his predecessor in the same chair, while Lord Dacre of Glanton, more commonly known as Professor Trevor-Roper, is the recently retired Regius Professor at Oxford. From this conjunction, a classical or prophetic scholar would no doubt bring forth a portent: if the conjunction of three kings signified so much, what might the ...”

“... Gay liberation, FitzGerald observes, was part of the Civil Rights struggle, but it was much more than that. Now that the feminist movement had passed its radical phase, gay activists saw themselves as the avant-garde of the sexual revolution and the revolutionary change in sex and gender roles. Specifically, their goal was to overturn one of the oldest ...”

“... doesn’t matter. It makes no difference.’ Many of the stories, however, are much more subtle, like the best parables, leaving the reader to ponder their significance. Of course, we should have reservations about the use of anecdote as a basis for public policy. Richard Posner once remarked that the United States is a nation of ...”

“... on Presidential Debates, can claim particular authority. (‘President John F. Kennedy told me more than once’ is the book’s opening phrase.) His and LaMay’s study is overwhelmingly concerned with the complex and often tortured history of the debates as an institution. There is some information – but not a lot – about the intricate negotiations ...”

“... Debs. There were two Socialist members of Congress, dozens of Socialist state legislators, and more than a hundred Socialist mayors. The leading Socialist newspaper, the Appeal to Reason, had more than 500,000 subscribers. And this was only a portion of a much broader swathe of the electorate who considered themselves ...”

“... 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 ...”