“... as artlessness, so this abundance of autobiographical detail can easily be mistaken for frank comprehensiveness. ‘His biographers are saved the search for significance,’ G.D.H. Cole declared: ‘he has it all ready for them.’ Only close reading reveals that Cobbett hardly ever mentioned his mother. Or that his wife (who tried to kill herself ...”

“... in his model of decency and upstandingness. Even if he doesn’t mind a Marxist scholar such as Thomas Hodgkin (in fact, he loved Hodgkin and supplies a strong, sympathetic portrait), contradiction is by and large a failing, hard to distinguish from dishonesty, or moral blindness. What drives this failing? Mostly high-mindedness; a wish for the world to be ...”

“... mix he found in his own father, ‘a blended sternness and softness that was wholly Scottish’. Thomas Stevenson was a curious but morbid man for whom darkness most immediately suggested the fiery regions of hell.His only son suffered from a terrible cough – ‘I love my native air, but it does not love me,’ Louis wrote – and could often be found, at ...”

“... Reformation; the first major ‘constellation’ contains More, the Italian city designers, and Thomas Müntzer. Strange companion-stars, one might well think, but, for the Manuels, they were all intent on specifying the nature of an ideal Christian society. Even if that be granted – and the dominant ideals of the Renaissance city-planners were surely ...”

“... became familiar companions to many an amateur. ‘To a person uninstructed in natural history,’ Thomas Huxley observed, ‘his country or sea-side stroll is a walk through a gallery filled with wonderful works of art, nine-tenths of which have their faces turned toward the wall.’ Elementary lessons on geology, astronomy, physiology and numerous other ...”

“... a hostile philanderer.) At a Harvard College full of incipient talent – his classmates included Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery and Donald Hall – Creeley felt discouraged and alone. ‘My eager thirst for knowledge, almost Jude-the-Obscurian in its innocence, was all but shut down by the sardonic stance of my elders,’ he recalled. He left ...”

“... especially despised Surrealism, reserving particular contempt for the New Apocalypse school (Dylan Thomas and Co), whose influence was just beginning to register on the Australian literary scene, mainly thanks to the only avant-garde journal of the time, Angry Penguins. Angry Penguins was edited by Max Harris, a student at Adelaide University, and John ...”

“... would have understood and approved the Roman indignation with which Housman spurned an admiring Frank Harris, writing how much he appreciated the ‘sarcasm’ of ‘1887’. ‘I can only reject and resent your truculent praise,’ replied Housman. Yet Horace, or the Greek poets, would no more have recognised their poetry in Housman’s versions of it than ...”

“... 10 March. At 6:45 a.m. I set off by car service to Newark airport to catch the 10 a.m. Virgin/Continental flight to Gatwick. At this time of the morning the New Jersey Turnpike is too busy altogether. This use of altogether, I’m reminded by Terence Patrick Dolan in A Dictionary of Hiberno-English, means ‘wholly, completely’ and may be compared to the Irish phrase ar fad, particularly in its positioning at the end of a sentence ...”

“... like longhand, however, there is more to be said; and more to be read. In Prophet of Innovation, Thomas McCraw has written a big book by almost anyone’s standards, except those of its subject, who would perhaps have regarded its five hundred pages of text as barely adequate for a full scholarly exposition of his life’s work. McCraw’s triumph is to tell ...”

“... Anthology had seen off the rival Oxford Anthology, produced by heavyweight academics including Frank Kermode and Harold Bloom, and the deep histories of English and British culture were being re-scripted. A revised edition of the Norton Anthology commissioned a translation of Beowulf from Heaney, and David Damrosch’s Longman Anthology of British ...”

“... philosopher abroad.’ And this is followed by a quotation, acknowledged only in the notes, from Thomas Bernhard’s fiction Wittgenstein’s Nephew: ‘Shaking their heads, they found it amusing that the world was taken in by the clown of their family, that that useless person had suddenly become famous and an intellectual giant in England.’ The ...”

“... the relation between the biography of philosophers, or indeed authors in general, and their work. Thomas Nagel, for instance, has suggested that they have practically nothing to do with one another. Philosophical work is autonomous: it stands on its own feet, and interpretation of it should be based on what it contains. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, on the other ...”

“... day, he remembers something he didn’t actually get to see: the ground is ‘where I once missed Frank Woolley just out when I arrived having made something like 70 in half an hour’. Others send birthday greetings, only to be trumped by the recipient: ‘The day doesn’t bother me. Just another. No better no worse. But the avalanche is appalling.’ Or ...”

“... in Morse code by an international gang of drug traffickers.In​ 1860, seventeen years before Thomas Edison patented the phonograph, as a way of translating sounds into marks on waxed paper, a French cardiologist called Étienne-Jules Marey developed a portable sphygmograph, or ‘pulse-writer’, a device attached to the wrist which used a stylus to ...”