“... J.S.Henslow as early as November 1839.) The importance of the Correspondence clearly lies in a more broadly defined social area. The second volume (like the first) is meticulously edited; the notes themselves provide an embarras de richesses, with enough arcane detail to keep scholars busy for a decade. Over a quarter of the tome is taken up by ...”

“... Lulworth, I left behind the yellow fields of EEC oil seed rape and travelled up onto the rougher, more English ground of Povington Hill. The heath still resembles the one Thomas Hardy imagined as Lear’s, but it is now part of the Royal Armoured Corps’s gunnery range: enclosed and blasted in a new sense. The road goes up ...”

“... why he had concluded his celebrated Lectures on Psychical Research: ‘For my own part I should be more annoyed than surprised if I should find myself in some sense persisting immediately after the death of my present body.’ I do hope he is not now passing his post-mortem retirement in the great caravan site in the sky. But the evidence, in so far as it ...”

“... Salinger. Keepers of the Flame is a further cogitation on the woes of biography, this time in a more objectively historical context. Hamilton offers 22 case studies, from John Donne – the first properly biographed English author – to Philip Larkin of last month’s Observer fame. Hamilton could not, if he tried, write an unreadable book. Keepers of the ...”

“... was a good boy, he should be given his degree. Then in the late January of 1592, he had got into a more spectacular kind of trouble: he was deported from the Dutch town of Flushing, accused of coining. In London he was interviewed by Burghley, the Lord Treasurer; though coining was a capital offence, he cannot have served ...”

“... The whole nasty episode situates Pickles in the body of judges who send women to prison more often and for longer than men with similar records who are convicted of similar offences, and the rest of the book shows why. ‘One woman told me she hated Page Three as she had had a mastectomy. This is the key to female condemnation of nude ...”

“... to last only thirty or forty years, but now seeing the prospect of living ‘a hundred years or more’ if only he could produce that ‘infallible’ system of medicine he was known to be searching for. He tried to dampen some of the wilder expectations of what he was on the verge of achieving: he said that while he could not promise ‘to render a man ...”

“... out complex arrangements of the most exotic trees and plants. Like his Norfolk contemporary Sir Thomas Browne, he admired the fact that a tree could ‘generate its like without violation of Virginity’. But he was no Swampy or tree-hugger. His plans for giant plantations of trees had a military and industrial purpose: they were eventually to be felled to ...”

“... hero; Agustín de Iturbide, the Mexican; Emperor Pedro I of Brazil; and, finally, Admiral Lord Thomas Cochrane, the astonishing Scottish maverick who played a key part in the liberation of Peru and the consolidation of Brazilian independence. It was not fashionable in the later 20th century to see history in terms of its great men. Yet however ...”

“... myths and ‘challenging’ stereotypes sometimes just makes the myths and stereotypes look more secure. Philip Parker’s title, The Northmen’s Fury, suggests a return to the 19th-century view – hair, beards and horned helmets – but his subtitle, ‘A History of the Viking World’, more accurately describes ...”

“... and escape. (‘Roses’) Guest died in 2006, and this Collected Poems amasses work from more than 20 books. She also wrote art and poetry criticism, a novel and a biography of the Imagist poet H.D. She became known as a poet in the 1950s under the auspices of the New York School, but was a Platonist at heart: ‘One must live in sovereign freedom ...”

“... reasons, it would doubtless be disliked by those who dislike philosophy as it is. But it might, more encouragingly, succeed in recruiting some new enemies as well, who would do it the credit of hating it for what it said and not just for what it was. Moral philosophy was not a game, and it was not for philosophers alone. Williams wrote long and important ...”

“... having to check her birthday for a profile and thinking I’d already wasted my life. And she was more glamorous than most of the actresses in the rest of the issue. ‘A genre is hardening,’ James Wood wrote in his review in the New Republic, and suddenly Smith was the epigone of ‘hysterical realism’, the misbegotten progeny of ...”

“... could only be kept fighting by coercion. It was, as historians have long since realised, a lot more complicated than this simple and ultimately misleading either/or story suggests. Apart from anything else, as Kershaw argued, there were many reasons most Germans didn’t give up despite a growing realisation that they were going to lose, and coercion ...”

“... off by the Greeks in flight from the invading Turks. The burning of Smyrna will follow, in which more than one hundred thousand Greeks and Armenians will die; Desdemona and Lefty, fleeing from the flames to America, will marry and have a child, whose own child will inherit the recessive joker-gene his grandparents unknowingly carried, and will be born ...”