“... remarks like ‘the golden rule is that there are no golden rules,’ made by people like George Bernard Shaw. The Yale Book lists these under the names of their authors, along with brief indications of their provenance and reliability. Books of quotations are no longer sources of things you might want to say or cite – after all, you can Google and copy ...”

“... in Other Passports. They are all formal verse and one of them, ‘To Pete Atkin: Letter from Paris’, was his initial attempt at ottava rima, the stanza chosen later for his extended verse diaries. In a letter slightly earlier than the one to Atkin, he sets out what by then had become, and was to remain for many years, his creed. Interestingly, this ...”

“... potent contempt than in Houellebecq’s letter on his mother in Public Enemies, an exchange with Bernard-Henri Lévy? He never felt greater disgust for this ‘absolutely self-centred creature’, he says, than when she told him, on one of perhaps 15 encounters between mother and son, that his former nanny had asked after him: ‘She thought it was ...”

“... in her essay, ‘Am I a Snob?’ In the discussion session which followed Williams’s paper, Bernard Sharratt remarked that although the Godwin circle had been repressed it nonetheless had had an influence on Hazlitt, whose critique of Malthus and Ricardo suggested an ‘alternative direction’ that could have been developed further. The Pre-Raphaelites ...”

“... press lords such as Rothermere and Beaverbrook and writers such as Wyndham Lewis and George Bernard Shaw. As late as 1968, the lugubrious Cecil King, Rothermere’s nephew and then boss of the Mirror Group, planned to install Mosley as the head of a military-backed government, with Mountbatten as his second choice. For short-term tactical ...”

“... the stalls. Germs of short stories can be found in her descriptions of the couple who argue over Bernard Shaw’s symbols, the woman who ‘speculates, never in silence’ about what’s going to happen next, and the soldier who ‘condescendingly translated’ bits of French to his girl. ‘You heard that guy saying toujours? That means today.’Parker was ...”

“... a family drama – a struggle between herself and Christabel (now running the WSPU from exile in Paris) over the movement’s strategy and their mother’s soul. She disliked the turn away from popular protest towards arson and property damage; she also wanted the WSPU to ally with Labour, as – albeit mostly for strategic reasons – the constitutionalist ...”

“... Committee for Medical and Psychological Emergencies that Fassin and Rechtman were attending in Paris. (The founding of this body in 1997 itself attests to the new public linking of inner and outer wounds.) In the wake of the collapse of the Twin Towers there was much talk of mass trauma, presented as an affirmation of a common humanity as if in parallel ...”

“... was not like the Cultural Revolution in China, nor comparable to the violence on the streets of Paris or in German universities in and around that particular year. But having gradually reduced the terms of his comparison, he then escalates it vertiginously: ‘It was an intellectual rather than a street revolution that dismantled the old literary ...”

“... years. Hippocrates was translated into Latin. (The great modern edition appeared in 19th-century Paris.) In an age like ours, when few doctors read papers more than ten years old, and a five-year-old textbook is obsolete, the longevity of Greek medicine is astounding. Yet Chinese medicine did not become global medicine and it is outside Porter’s brief to ...”

“... England and the old Empire to talk freely to mad old Indians. Change involved the right of George Bernard Shaw to say that the long lying-in-state of the dead queen was a danger to public health, and for the slow emergence of figures such as D.H. Lawrence and E.M. Forster, who would dramatise in novels the end of restriction and the beginning of new ...”

“... especial vehemence against the Armenians. Its wealthy hero, Gabriel Bragadian, has returned from Paris to his native village of Yoghonoluk and slides into his dead father’s role as informal leader of his own and the neighbouring Armenian villages; he isn’t a separatist or sectarian but a loyal, indeed patriotic citizen of the Ottoman Empire, which has ...”

“... is acknowledged in Fagles’s rendering, and also in the (outstandingly helpful) introduction by Bernard Knox, who speaks of the analogy of the lion ‘going his own barbaric way’ as one in which Achilles is seen as ‘the lower extreme of Aristotle’s alternatives – a beast’. The perception is here Apollo’s, not Homer’s, and is that of a Trojan ...”

“... scandalous omission of any of Christina Rossetti’s poems from the Longman anthology edited by Bernard Richards. I merely puzzle over the fact that Browning’s ‘Caliban upon Setebos,’ only five lines shorter than ‘The Hunting of the Snark’, is in the anthology but doesn’t make a fifth in the list.) Clough’s magnificent tragi-comedy, whose ...”

“... intended to create a state for Jews in a province that was more than 90 per cent Arab. At the Paris peace talks in 1919, a French delegate let slip that France would not oppose a Jewish ‘state’ in Palestine. Weizmann cautioned him. He explained: ‘We ourselves had been very careful not to use this term.’ In July 1920, while the Allies were still ...”