“... 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 ...”

“... from Potsdamer Platz’). But the seven songs on Blackstar add up to a record as complete as, and more coherent than, Station to Station or Low.When, three days after it came out, the news broke that Bowie was dead, 18 months after being diagnosed with cancer, Blackstar suddenly turned into something else, not his latest record but his last. He hadn’t been ...”

“... you, would I, you stupid, lanky FUCK.’ He gave up on me after that, and went looking for someone more amenable. Far more disturbing than the disaffected wastrels loitering on our streets, who probably wouldn’t spend their time trying to cadge booze off strangers if they were given the opportunity of something better to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... himself as a leader in the way that his contemporary Ramsay MacDonald did. He thought of himself more as a representative than a politician, and as Brown’s biography shows, it’s striking how certain he was that he expressed the views of those he represented and on whose behalf he fought: children and the unemployed mainly. An ‘agitator for ...”

“... He went first to Heidelberg to learn German, then in 1892 enrolled as a medical student at St Thomas’s Hospital. His first book, Liza of Lambeth, published in 1897, when he was 23, owed much to Maupassant and Zola. It was a grimy realist novel about the South London underclass he’d come into contact with through the hospital – a first instance of ...”

“... own childhood. It often does. The comic war in Pantagruel is set in Utopia – Rabelais knew his Thomas More and borrowed from him both the thirsty Dipsodes and the obscure Amaurotes. In Gargantua he fits the rivalries between France and the Holy Roman Empire into the tiny world of castle, wood and ford which could be seen from the windows of his ...”

“... know whether to laugh or to cry at the procedure, and two Colombian Indians are reported by Hugh Thomas as saying, in 1515, that the Pope must have been drunk when he divided between the Spanish and the Portuguese so much land which wasn’t his to give. The procedure was not simply absurd, however. Or even ‘at once ridiculous and touching’, as ...”

“... I must declare an interest in this particular Thomas. Dylan, R.S., above all the heart-inscribed Edward – these I admire, respect, claim. D.M. I have had little luck with. Our relationship began with the publication some years ago of The Flute Player, a novel which, I had heard, concerned the life of Osip Mandelstam ...”

“... appear somewhat later, in the mid-Seventies, and is only now reaching full flower. Its origins lie more in the conservative revival of those years than in the leftist climate which produced the re-interpretation of the Cold War. But the new view of Eisenhower has been no less a part of the broad assault on mainstream liberalism than the new view of the Cold ...”

“... these, not radical revisions of transmitted texts and world pictures, occupied the likes of Thomas Thomas and Cantrell Legge. Format and coverage conspire to make the book seem an exercise in that nostalgic obsession with the minutiae of the local past to which Cambridge dons succumb even more readily than their ...”

“... was ordained. The same year, his father bought for him the living of New Brentford, worth £200 or more. The long-term consequence of this was that Horne was debarred as a clergyman from the two careers at which he had the talent and inclination to excel, the law and Parliamentary politics, for he spoke well and wrote better. During the 1760s, he took every ...”

“... at bedtime. It also means he won’t be able to record the first session of his interview with Thomas, his nonagenarian mentor, a writer, historian and filmmaker. The sense of boundlessness is gone, bound as the narrator is by his obligations as a parent on the one hand and his duty to his elders and employers on the other. Such is the nature of middle ...”

“... Any pushy, worldly man or woman of letters would like to find and befriend a Thomas Warton. The great 18th-century editor of Shakespeare, Edmond Malone, certainly recognised his usefulness. Malone, single-minded in his pursuit of standards of textual scholarship that would trump preceding editors of Shakespeare, knew that his friendship with Warton was uniquely helpful ...”

“... awful’. Early memoirists take us further with Swift’s character, but only so far. His godson Thomas Sheridan recalled that ‘he always appeared to the world in a mask, which he never took off but in the company of his most intimate friends.’ Yet this unmasking, such as it was, only seems to have confused things further. The most memorable assessments ...”