“... of Bovington, Boyce, Brabrook, Bond et al,’ they say. ‘And as for all those Garys you’re so keen on, why not make up two teams of them, plus subs? Let’s see now: Ablett, Bennett, Brookes ...’ These past few years, these years of rampant soccer cred, have been a slow torment for the antique soccer bore. In the old days we were friendless and perhaps ...”

“... a reactionary force, and it has in its time contained some appalling reactionaries. The Nazis were keen on wholegrain bread, and against artificial colourings and preservatives in food; the SS controlled 75 per cent of Germany’s mineral water production; Hitler’s doctor, Theodor Morell, held up the use of DDT in the Third Reich until 1943, on the grounds ...”

“... was, deliberately insulated from the highly-charged milieux of the Age of Steam, Soap and Steel. Peter Harman’s new book tries to demonstrate how much metaphysics mattered in the everyday labours of Victorian Britain’s greatest mathematical physicist. Comparisons are odious, but league-tables are another feature of the public life of contemporary ...”

“... that Aeschylus’ rival Phrynichus was particularly noted for his choreographies, or learn from Peter Wilson in Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy that the shawm (aulos) which always accompanied a performance came in various shapes and sizes depending on the musical context (the ‘wedding shawm’, for example, consisted of one ‘male’ and one ...”

“... out to be more fickle than science allows for. Milton has been advised by his chiropractor friend Peter Takakis, who is around for the family’s traditional Sunday afternoon open-house debating session, that – since male sperm swim faster than female sperm – a couple, to have a baby girl, ‘should have sexual congress 24 hours prior to ovulation’. The ...”

“... a desire to save my soul.’ Four scholars were invited to reply to Coetzee – Marjorie Garber, Peter Singer, Barbara Smuts and Wendy Doniger – and all of them struggled in different ways to read his meanings. Singer seemed to suggest that Coetzee’s device was fundamentally evasive. ‘It’s a marvellous device, really. Costello can blithely criticise ...”

“... Row suits, could easily be a real-life counterpart of Dorothy L. Sayers’s fictional sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey. (It’s a nice touch that the affair gets a mention in her 1935 detective novel Gaudy Night. Wimsey himself had clearly been following it keenly.) The dishevelled, corduroy-clad communist Pollard has more than a whiff of Le Carré about him: in one ...”

“... make me un-English, or even absurd? George Puttenham, whose Arte of English Poesie (1589) was keen to police rhetorical excess in the interests of spare London courtly English, inveighed against the use of ‘words of exceeding great length, which have been fetched from the Latin inkhorn or borrowed of strangers, the use of them in rhyme is nothing ...”

“... front’.Carey is excellent at sketching biographies, quoting judiciously and generously, and keen to be explanatory without being patronising: you can see in the use of anecdote and analogy the experience of years lecturing to drifting undergraduates. (The Elizabethans fretted about whether or not they were damned, he explains at one point, rather like ...”

“... a book of unrevised lectures called Varieties of Parable and a Collected Poems. Even now, with Peter McDonald’s intelligently re-edited Collected, we do not have all the MacNeice we could ask for. As McDonald points out, a Complete Poems would be considerably larger than the 600-odd pages of verse plus seven appendices of fugitive poems, prefaces and ...”

“... mounted, he was easily entrapped. The most persistent of the pretenders who plagued Henry was Peter Warbeck (baptised ‘Perkin’ by the regime to make him sound silly), who claimed to be Richard of York, the younger of the vanished princes. European rulers keen to destabilise England had promoted the claims of this ...”

“... in fact it was Duncan Grant, who lived with her mother, but generally slept with men and wasn’t keen on acting as an authority figure. Angelica retreated into an affair with the much older Garnett, who – and this is where it begins to sound like you’re making things up – had been Duncan’s lover when Angelica was born. ‘Its beauty is the remarkable ...”

“... mettle in the towns, where they could prepare for government once the Red Army had come through. Peter Conradi handles this material extremely well, and draws on E.P. Thompson’s lectures in Stanford in 1981 about his brother, later collated by his widow, Dorothy Thompson, as Beyond the Frontier. E.P. is more committed than Conradi to the idea that Frank ...”

“... Cup and the Lucina Cup – the press had a heyday celebrating ‘a new type of river girl … keen-eyed and close-shingled’, ‘Miss M.B. Carstairs, foremost motorboat enthusiast in Britain’.These triumphs, though spectacular, were relatively short-lived. In 1928 Carstairs commissioned an exorbitantly expensive speedboat, the Jack Stripes, which she ...”

“... our understanding of how F1 was produced – W.W. Greg, Charlton Hinman and their living heir, Peter Blayney – ever owned a copy. The current respective valuations placed on F1 and on the labour of those who study it, indeed, make painfully obvious the independence of the Folio’s price from the scholarly industry on which West implies its value partly ...”