“... forum was kept clean but the stone flooring, which had worn paper-thin, was not replaced. There may still have been rich people living comfortably, and there are signs that some big landowners extended their estates as smaller ones had to sell up, but it didn’t do them much good, once the local markets and the middle-range consumers on whom their ...”

“... profile and monkish tonsure on display. Toulouse-Lautrec and van Dongen followed suit. Fénéon may not have liked it, but it was the more interesting view. In full face he looks as if he might be someone else: in old age he resembled Gide. Whereas the profile shot offered artists much more promising material: a big boney nose, prominent chin and, beneath ...”

“... appropriately poignant quotes from the Iliad. Or so the story goes. Whatever Nero’s popularity may have been among the grass-roots (enough, certainly, to encourage a series of ‘false Neros’ to attempt to reclaim his position in the years that followed), he had sufficiently outraged elite opinion that by 68 almost every Army commander and provincial ...”

“... of the last half-century’. She certainly had at least two illegitimate children, and Caroline may have been another. It’s possible that her father was the playwright and politician Thomas Brinsley Sheridan. Such parentage would be far more in accordance with Caroline’s character and behaviour than that of her official father. Douglass finds the ...”

“... have met a porcupine in a book and liked the word. Like Rowe, too, Greenblatt thinks Shakespeare may have stolen deer, but for him this was ‘a skilful assault upon property, a symbolic violation of the social order, a coded challenge to authority’, since Greenblatt likes appositional clauses as much as he likes to think that Will was a bit of a boy ...”

“... loses his position anyway, judged politically unreliable. The year 1941 finds him, unlikely as it may seem, living in a cold little house in Clontarf, riding his bicycle every day to his office at the newly founded Institute for Advanced Studies in the centre of Dublin. It is here that the main action of the book begins. The institute is de Valera’s special ...”

“... worth the delay, which mimes its readers’ prurient flutter at the sexy-sounding word. Sterne may have picked up a few tips from Harington. The main reason jovial, learned, scatological Harington isn’t better known is that he spread his energies so widely among diverse literary kinds. He is best known as a translator rather than an inventor. The story ...”

“... to relive an episode from your past rather than inertly recollecting it, because in repetition you may be spared the melancholy inherent in recollection. Repetition, for Robbe-Grillet, is more humdrum: it means reliving the act of writing a novel and reintegrating along the way small situations and favoured motifs from the books that made his name in the 1950s ...”

“... he thinks the child meant to call his enormous instructor a ‘fairy elephant’ ). It may be true that in the 1960s and early 1970s Johnson was, as Coe’s publishers maintain, ‘one of the best-known young novelists in Britain’, but his celebrity quickly faded. Now, as this large biography attests, there has been a revival of interest. Coe has ...”

“... in his ‘Art poétique’ of 1874. The line must have lodged in Edward Thomas’s mind: in May 1914, some six months before his late efflorescence into verse at the age of 36, he wrote to Robert Frost of his longing to ‘wring all the necks of my rhetoric – the geese’. He was referring to the over-elaborate style of some of his prose writings, but ...”

“... things people are inclined to take seriously – literary prizes, global conspiracies, life – may turn out to be someone’s idea of a great big joke. Gravity’s Rainbow was written during the Vietnam War and published a year after the Watergate break-in. But it is set 30 years earlier, during the last war that the US engaged in as one of the unambiguous ...”

“... there was a good deal of affection in it and it was funny in its own right. But Dudley (who may have known them slightly and certainly had met them) unthinkingly entitled the piece ‘Little Miss Britten’. Now Dudley was not malicious nor had he any reason to mock their homosexuality, of which indeed he may have ...”

“... male fairies, or incubuses, had a reputation for being lovers, rapists, sexual predators. They may have disappeared, but the friars on their perpetual rounds of what we might call ‘chugging’, visiting peasant households while the husbands are out in the fields, have taken on the role of the creatures they exorcised. The joke didn’t need ...”

“... Adams locates at Penselwood in Somerset), before beating the Vikings at the Battle of Edington in May 878 and imposing on them a treaty and a boundary, which – for once, and for a while – they respected. This started the long process of resistance, reconquest, English unification and English overlordship that would lead to his grandson Athelstan calling ...”

“... thinks too much of herself; if she isn’t she doesn’t care enough (though here at least ‘she may thank God’, as Collier writes darkly in her Essay, ‘that her ugliness will preserve her from being a whore’). Portia and Cylinda have little time for the play-acting and suppressing of instincts this list of rules requires of women. The mixture of ...”