“... It must feel odd – and more than a bit unsettling – to realise that sooner or later, perhaps in your lifetime, somebody will write your biography. Biographers can get lives badly wrong; and even when they get things right, giving attentive accounts with the salient facts in order, they may leave out friendships and discoveries that contributed greatly to a writer’s inner life ...”

“... wanderlad’, ‘liddel oud oddity’, ‘loose carollaries’, ‘Lewd’s carol’ and much more, including anagrams and reversed spellings. Here is a more extended reference: ‘Though Wonderlawn’s lost us for ever. Alis, alas, she broke the glass! Liddell looker through the leafery, ours is mistery of pain.’ The ...”

“... and they enjoyed discussing which characters they admired and loathed.One novel gripped them more than all the rest: Richardson’s gigantic Clarissa, published serially (with agonising gaps) between December 1747 and December 1748. At the end of Vol. IV, published in April 1748, Clarissa is left perilously ignorant of the fact that her villainous ...”

“... took this as evidence of supernatural forces. The faltering anabasis towards knowledge is all the more uncertain when the knowledge pursued is knowledge of the self. But the little tricks our minds play on us have proved to be fine doors into the way our minds work. Why, asked the 19th-century German physician Hermann von Helmholtz, do we see coloured ...”

“... was sent after the school in Brisbane. Porter’s early published poems, which were preceded by more than 500 unpublished ones, reveal a poet fusing Auden (not least his sense of the fascistic public school) with his own Australian background and his situation as an immigrant fascinated by London. In ‘Annotations of Auschwitz’ we hear of ‘lives ...”

“... conscience. The Book of Daniel is a sympathetic account of the Rosenberg martyrs (or spies, as a more commonly received idea has it). Ragtime concentrated its attack on the Morgan, Ford, Frick band of capitalist robber barons. Thirdly, there is the populist. Doctorow has yearned to enlarge the constituency of novel-readership. He desires, as he once put it ...”

“... it finished; the middle movement forte in D major is very stupid, and the whole modulations savour more of counterpoint than of train oil and seagulls and salt fish – and it ought to be exactly the reverse.’ Todd does resist, with the result that his Mendelssohn is the stuffy, spoiled, Prince Charles-ish stereotype of aloofness that I’m sure he’s ...”

“... by his fervently anti-communist adviser on counterinsurgency, Walt Whitman Rostow), Kennedy spoke more explicitly of wars of liberation being waged in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and called for ‘a whole new kind of strategy, a wholly different kind of force, and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training’.After 1961, US special ...”

“... from its changing scientific basis. But historians of science followed Butterfield’s preaching more than his practice. By the 1960s and 1970s, most of them had come to consider progressivism and presentism as professional sins, and embraced what anthropologists called ‘charitable interpretation’. This left them exposed, both to scientists, many of whom ...”

“... one. He actually acquired an image, which was fostered by the 1790s media, especially by a host of more or less funny novels which featured him performing appropriate professorial actions. As Mr Vapour, he was made to illustrate his doctrine of perfectibility with an experiment to train sparrows to swarm like bees. As Dr Stupeo, he set out to establish a just ...”

“... graduates and/or instructors), divided into three main groups: ‘technomodernism’ (John Barth, Thomas Pynchon), ‘high cultural pluralism’ (Toni Morrison, Sandra Cisneros) and ‘lower-middle-class modernism’ (Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates), with Venn diagrams illustrating the overlap between these groups, and their polarisation by aesthetic ...”

“... the medical profession began the process of putting the treatment of the mental illnesses on a more scientific footing. The 19th century saw the identification of a number of organically-based mental diseases, while the early 20th century saw the development of a scientific psychological medicine, informed by the writings of both Meyer and Freud, which ...”

“... but eventually you may proceed to a full (or utility) patent, where property rights are wrapped up more securely, and, while IP lawyers make fortunes from litigation about who in fact owns the property, basically the matter is now in the domain of formal law. If the university does manage to license the IP, you will get perhaps 35 per cent of the royalty ...”

“... of rising inequality, labour market precarity and escalating housing costs, it has become more and more difficult to pretend that ‘hard work’ is an adequate basis for supporting a family. Governments pursuing austerity policies are unwilling to supplement wages to the degree needed to lift all working people out ...”

“... Anthologies attract good haters. In the 1790s, the reformer Hannah More blamed their editors for the decay of morals: to let people assume that you had read the entire work from which an anthology piece was excerpted, she warned girls, was no better than lying outright. In the 1840s, less predictably, Engels took time out from The Condition of the Working Class in England to sneer at the anthologies littering the sofa tables of the Manchester bourgeosie ...”