“... teacher who would like to spend her time reading Keats and Donne with her pupils; still, there’s more than one type of ambiguity, and it’s clear enough which type Humphrys has in mind: politicians rather than poets are his targets. He also hates ‘management speak’: ‘Each specialist library will be the product of a community of practice of all those ...”

“... mainshock before its occurrence.’ On 30 March, Giuliani says he was forbidden from making any more public pronouncements. The next day, a special meeting of the Commissione Nazionale per la Previsione e Prevenzione dei Grandi Rischi was convened in L’Aquila (the commission usually met in Rome). ‘It is unlikely that an earthquake like the one in ...”

“... a German shepherd bitch and her five puppies, which lived in one of the bunker’s bathrooms. Ever more dissociated from the outside world, he continued to issue impossible orders to armies that no longer existed, and had officers appointed, sacked and executed as the whim took him. Within hours of Hitler’s suicide, General Hans Krebs set out to pay a visit ...”

“... to 70 years after the death of the author, came into force in Britain on 1 January 1996. They are more lenient in cases where copyright was revived rather than merely extended, and publishing material copied from 1922 – most of the words in the ‘Reader’s Edition’ – wasn’t unlawful, Mr Justice Lloyd ruled, but payment of royalties was required. For ...”

“... and eloquently, declared 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 ...”

“... collections was pedagogic. At the same time, changes were taking place in art museums. There was more to see and more people to see it. Works were displayed so as to illustrate the character of national schools and an evolution of styles in which primitive representations gave way to ...”

“... is the best measure, they found that 77.3 per cent of those questioned thought reading ‘can be more exciting than watching a film’, 81.8 per cent thought it could be more exciting than TV and, ‘staggeringly’, 23.7 per cent thought it ‘can be more exciting than sex’. You could ...”

“... him a good 50 years younger than Wilson – and it’s not straightforwardly a novel, either. More a set of notes. Wilson appears to subscribe to the unorthodox ‘tell don’t show’ school of fiction-writing. Raff’s cousin, for example, is introduced as ‘a strikingly pretty blonde but something of an airhead whose principal interest was boys and ...”

“... could be treated with a simple course of antibiotics. But the pharmaceutical industry is a more interesting, more morally ambiguous subject than, say, the arms trade – with which it’s explicitly compared in the film – because its side effects include treating disease, easing pain and preserving life, and no ...”

“... And it’s all disturbingly free. Although the internet has spread around the world, it’s used more intensively in some places than others. One of Zook’s useful maps shows that more than 35 per cent of the population of North America, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Japan use the internet, but the figure for ...”

“... shrine: here are great names, great subjects, not examination-notes. The Village Press offers more than sixty books by and about J. C. Powys and his brothers – and there is much more to come, numerous letters to collect. That word ‘village’ links rural Britain, Vole country, with Greenwich Village. So does ...”

“... Eagar​ made his career taking photographs of cricketers, though when he started out in London more than fifty years ago his subjects were mainly party people. In 1966, he took a picture with his Leica of someone he’d never heard of: Oskar Schindler. ‘It is not an exciting shot,’ he once said. ‘But it exists. It is just about the only photograph I ...”

“... shades vigilantly or solicitously hovering over their shoulders as they write. The biographer of Thomas Carlyle is supervised more severely than most: the irritable, brooding Scotsman, the would-be redeemer, and, failing that, the scourge of Victorian England, seems to breathe flame down his neck. To write about Carlyle ...”

“... the new experimental philosophers should rely only on their own reason and experience. Sir Thomas Browne declared that ‘a powerfull enemy unto knowledge’ was ‘confident adherence unto any Authority, or resignation of our judgments upon the testimony of any Age or Author whatsoever’; and Robert Boyle ruled that it was ‘improper’ to ‘urge ...”

“... them one last time. The ‘irony’ of which, as Burrell would say (the only words that he misuses more often are ‘surreal’ and ‘enormity’), is that he’s a die-hard monarchist, as he reveals in his memoir, A Royal Duty (Michael Joseph, £17.99), a book at once agonisingly boring and shamefully fascinating. Much the most interesting bits are the ...”