“... and ambitious as he is, even as he contemplates the killing of his king, can still represent a more ordinary human disarray among matters that are too large, too consequential for us. Alert too to see that Shakespeare represents this case not only dramatically but also through his character’s choice of an individual word. But then to call the other words ...”

“... books); the German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz; the early 19th-century English physicist Thomas Young; and the 19th-century American palaeontologist Joseph Leidy. Then there are ‘men who knew too much’ (Robert Hooke, Alan Turing, G.K. Chesterton and, predictably, Alfred Hitchcock) and those whose knowledge ‘changed ...”

“... is shown to a viewer counts as one impression). But an advertiser can also buy ad slots, often far more cheaply, in what they call ‘open auctions’ or the ‘open marketplace’. There, demand from multiple advertisers is brought together electronically with supply from any website whose content carries ad slots (news publishers are distinctly in the ...”

“... English in its good-humoured and long-suffering manner, The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe is in more ways than one a caution. The cautionary tale it tells concerns the unplanned growth of the canon of Defoe’s works, which has sprawled from a hundred items to something like six times that figure in the last two centuries. P.N. Furbank and W.R. Owens take ...”

“... gut, shitten shepherds, and other suchlike defamatory epithets’. As these few tasters from Sir Thomas Urquhart’s translation of Rabelais indicate, swearing can be fun: ‘slabberdegullion druggels’ (slovenly dimbos) and ‘noddie meacocks’ (limp-wristed wimps) have the surreal energy of abuse forged in the heat. But Urquhart’s list of obscenities ...”

“... last Venus observations in 1914, and he died of a brain haemorrhage two years later. This sounds more associatively dire than it should. But Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Seasons Quartet puts the reader in a highly associative state of mind. Autumn, which begins the project, announces itself as a letter to an unborn daughter, Knausgaard’s soon to be fourth ...”

“... as dancing’. She hadn’t heard of Godard but liked the film’s title. She discovered something more enticing than flirting: ‘I knew there was someone there in front of me and I had to be present, too. [The film] required me to exist.’ The experience was unrepeatable. Every film to come would be ‘less good than Pierrot le fou’. This is the story ...”

“... correspondence: ‘Between December 1946 and April 1984, Philip Larkin wrote to Monica Jones more than 1421 letters and 521 postcards: about 7500 surviving pages.’ (Larkin also generally wrote to his mother twice a week, but those letters remain unpublished; they might convey another aspect of Larkin the man, but from those quoted, a less interesting ...”

“... economic output had dropped by a quarter. The unemployment rate hovered at around 25 per cent, more than three times the pre-crisis level. About 22 per cent of the population suffered from what the European statistics agency defines as ‘severe material deprivation’ – the inability to pay mortgage or rent payments, or to afford things like a washing ...”

“... is with us still. Even the clergyman who performed the service was soon disillusioned. The Rev. Thomas Noel had been promised some ‘substantial’ token of the groom’s appreciation. He received instead one of the rings of which Byron kept a plentiful supply to distribute to admirers. Noel was used to disappointment. An illegitimate cousin of ...”

“... of Europe, from Scotland and Russia to Spain and Portugal, struggled to adjust to demands for more open forms of government, for freedom from religious interference in secular affairs, for more humane attitudes towards the poor, the outcast, criminals and slaves, for a more rational ...”

“... which is so wedded to the application of neoclassical economic theory that it cannot accommodate more diverse modes of human behaviour, that it assumes a static, equilibrium economy when its real concern is with change over time, and which presupposes perfect competition, full utilisation of resources, rational and profit-maximising entrepreneurs, and ...”

“... wisdom, maturity or ‘reverent openness before life’. From the opposite point of view, it was more than a passing whimsy which led the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovski to hail Tristram Shandy as ‘the most typical novel in world literature’. The contrast is nicely representative. Leavis rejects the experimental strain in fiction – just as he ...”

“... brightest anthropologists of his generation, he scorned his peers on the way out. ‘I’m both more productive intellectually than they are, and I’m having more fun. It must drive them crazy.’This barb suggests a thick-skinned arrogance that hardly matched the intense, hunched, broken-toothed, clever, boyish, utterly ...”

“... By spring 1940 France and Britain had been at war with Germany for more than six months; Belgium was already occupied by the Nazis. On 9 June some fifty divisions Of the German Army under von Rundstedt, a commander so formidable that even Hitler is said to have treated him with considerable respect, struck southwards from Belgium towards Rheims ...”