“... and keeping the maximum number of plates spinning with flicks of punctuation. It would do Henry James’s vision more violence to translate his books into an English deprived of intermediate stops than to render them in a comma-rich Esperanto. The novels of Proust and Mann would lose much of their intellectual flavour if commas were rationed. Céline took ...”

“... school, and cut my teeth on the literature of the contemporary American West: writers such as James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko, Donald Barthelme, Pam Houston and Rick Bass, some of whom counted McMurtry as a friend. But I must have regarded the ubiquity of his paperbacks in second-hand bookshops as reason to dismiss him. I had developed a taste for ...”

“... Justice rival ancient ROME;/Let NERO’s Vices meet with NERO’s Doom,/And speed’ly call King JAMES from Exile Home.’ Cookson spent a winter in Newgate Prison.Using a loathed historical or literary figure as a stand-in for an unpopular contemporary one was a favourite trick of early modern writers who wanted to print sedition and get away with it ...”

“... their moment of glory. Front of stage is initially given to such little-known figures as Dr James Stagg, the chief weatherman on whose forecasts everything rested. Faced with a mass of conflicting data (and many doubting colleagues), Stagg finally called it right, scrubbing 5 June for 6 June, thereby avoiding the worst ever Channel storm. Rommel, in ...”

“... that was more subtly responsive to local weather than any before or since. Norman Shaw, Baillie Scott and Philip Webb designed houses with central ‘living halls’, sociable spaces from which rooms led off, opening out in bay windows to take the inhabitants into the garden on the most inclement of days. Yet, Harris insists, ‘ivy clung thickly, all year ...”

“... radicals. Although he belonged to a different branch of Whiggery from the more francophile Charles James Fox, Pitt too was a Whig. He never described himself as anything else, and had championed parliamentary reform during the 1780s. At Horne Tooke’s treason trial, the reformer claimed that he was only repeating what Pitt himself had said a decade ...”

“... to a pamphlet: a print-off of an address given by Quentin Bell in May 1976 – his fifth Gwilym James Memorial Lecture at the University of Southampton. I recommend the pamphlet, titled ‘A Demotic Art’. It told me, learnedly and amusingly, just what I wanted to know about the ‘coroplasts of Boeotia’. (The nearest my Shorter Oxford Dictionary comes ...”

“... Bodies and Put out more flags are skimped because he has dealt with them separately elsewhere, Scott-King’s Modern Europe and Love Among the Ruins are shrugged off as of little interest, which is all right with me. Brideshead Revisited receives 78 pages, while the others get about twenty each. Davis has also studied the circumstances under which they ...”

“... of Gondar-based Ethiopia owed much to the travels of the Scottish ‘explorer’ James Bruce, who landed at Massawa in 1769, and reached Gondar in the following year. His visit was comparable in importance to that of Alvares a quarter of a millennium earlier, and those of the 17th-century Jesuits. Bruce was to become the author of a ...”

“... Virgin Mary. Even the joust made a stylised come-back. In the 1840s, on the present-day site of James Stirling’s Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart. Swabian aristocrats dressed up as crusading knights and Saracens to stage a tourney using original weapons, complete with pages, squires and a back-drop of lemon trees especially imported for the occasion. This was ...”

“... in the chronicles of biological discovery, does not rank in glamour with the exploits of Captain Scott and Sir Edmund Hillary. Hydrozoa are commonly known as jellyfish, and Huxley seems to have devoted a lot of time in the 1840s to examining the interior workings of tapeworms (cestodes, or endoparasitic platyelmia). Hard to make a bestseller out of ...”

“... thank it for that and ask no more of it.’ The Trevelyans were synthetic Border Whigs as Sir W. Scott was a synthetic Border Tory. It is doubtful whether the great families of Northumbria quite saw the Regius Professor and Cambridge master as the representative of landed tradition – the mask he wore in Cambridge. For one thing, his Tory acquaintance was ...”

“... number of gay men top the Trumpist pyramid (Peter Thiel, for instance, or the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent) and others lurk on its digital outskirts, but O’Neill isn’t one of them. He obviously didn’t believe his statements undermined his heterosexuality. Presumably this would be a risk only if he were the one being penetrated, and thus dominated ...”

“... place to look is the Introduction. OED2 reprints the Historical Introduction to the OED1 by C.T. Onions, which tells how the editors, headed by James Murray, relied on armies of volunteer readers. These readers worked through lists of titles provided for them by the editors, and recorded on slips of paper the words ...”

“... name of a dubious decorum. What was their relationship like? In a telling family memoir from 1867, James Edward Austen-Leigh, Austen’s nephew, described it thus: Their sisterly affection for each other could scarcely be exceeded. Perhaps it began on Jane’s side with a feeling of deference natural to a loving child towards a kind elder sister. Something of ...”