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“... Yet one has to admire his thoroughness. In the search for gendering toads Sams leaves no stone unturned, and he’s only shallow when it suits him. What he says of other Shakespeareans, in drumming decasyllabons, seems apt: The doubts do not derive from any dearth Of data, which are dauntingly copious. What is missing is a methodology. And ...”

“... Humphreys read hundreds of inscriptions, contemplated the scenes represented on pottery and stone tomb monuments, painstakingly reconstructed family trees, and analysed the patterns of burial in a number of different sites. She found that nuclear families tended to be buried together, and that starting in the fifth century both the monuments and ...”

“... the work. This halt in the narrative of Priestley’s remarkable career invites comparison with Richard Holmes’s biography of Coleridge, which stopped just as his protagonist set sail in spring 1804 for Mediterranean exile, or with Janet Browne’s recent first volume of a large-scale life of Charles Darwin. Holmes asks what we might now think of ...”

“... BBC had created (Ted Ray, Billy Cotton and his band, the gramophone record-presenter Christopher Stone), and not only set them off to better advantage but did so in pre-recorded, packaged series that were much more profitable for the performer. In an early demonstration of the dread art of scheduling, the commercial stations also concentrated their forces on ...”

“... for your dinner. Let her get everything ready to make you happy and then see the look on your stone face when you come in at night and sit down at the table. A surprise for dinner? Oh, my girl, that is merely his due for a miserable day of bad writing. Z/R’s seriousness about the art of writing, and his reverence for writers, including himself, is one ...”

“... contributing in a loud, shrill voice remarks like ‘Mr Henry was a heavy man – nearly 16 stone – it was a job for him to push his bicycle uphill’ – in the middle of all the other conversation wh: he couldn’t hear. Her humour was in that tradition in which her father and her uncle Ronald excelled, and which Punch, at its best, epitomised. In ...”

“... themselves are supported by nothing. Harrison sees the word ‘UNITED graffitied on my parents’ stone’. At least this is better than the CUNT, PISS, FUCK, SHIT and PAKI GIT on some of the other tombs, and Harrison even tries – or parodies himself trying – to get a higher meaning from the sprayed word. Perhaps ‘united’ means ‘united in ...”

“... locating the source of Greek abstract thought and Plato’s ideal forms in the advent of writing; Richard Seaford’s rooting of these features in the monetisation of Greek society; and of course Marshall McLuhan’s celebration of the medium’s production of the message. Not to mention (and, curiously, Debray doesn’t) the interconnections between base and ...”

“... constituted a growing proportion of the population and why the eminent Presbyterian Richard Baxter was convinced that a large proportion of those ‘born of Christian Parents’ had ‘banished’ faith from their ‘Hearts and Lives’. Often described as ‘worldlings’, these were people who denied God less in thoughts and words than in ...”

“... claiming to be a former servant, ‘turned away for no reason’, asking that £20 be left under a stone in Tynemouth: ‘me famalry are now starving the Butchers will let them have no more meet, the Bakers will let them have no more bread what must we do, I’m resolved now to go to Immirica.’ The letter was published in the London Gazette, since Brown had ...”

“... is missing, but anxious that people should not suspect that it is his integrity. The career of Richard Crossman refuted these stereotypes rather in the manner that Samuel Johnson, by stubbing his foot against a rock, claimed to refute Berkeley: what was lost as a formal exercise was pure gain as an object lesson. For Crossman remained incorrigibly attached ...”

“... this fellow declared his own outlaw ethic in words that for me will always be cut into the stone of Hawksmoor’s building: ‘I’ve never raped. I’ve never mugged. I’ve never robbed a working-class home.’ As he sank away towards the underworld of the crypt, we ascended the hierarchical steps to hear music by Messiaen and Hans Werner Henze. The ...”

“... of future troubles. A baby brother died when she was six, and within the year another brother, Richard, died from scarlet fever. As Susannah Clapp put it in her review of Fitzgerald’s biography (LRB, 20 December 1984), Mew liked to play the child, but child’s play was always a peculiarly fraught affair. In one poem she addresses Sorrow and remembers ...”

“... when ancient dames chose forth brocade) Modern chalk drawings, studies from the nude, Samples of stone, jet, breccia, porphyry Polished and rough, sundry amazing busts In baked earth, (broken, Providence be praised!) A wreck of tapestry, proudly-purposed web When reds and blues were indeed red and blue, Now offered as a mat to save bare feet . . . The book ...”

“... unashamed fan of minor Hollywood pictures. Breathless, as Godard readily admitted, was inspired by Richard Quine’s Pushover and could be seen as the direct sequel to Otto Preminger’s Bonjour tristesse. The central character of the film, the petty criminal played by Belmondo, modelled his self-image on that of Humphrey Bogart in Mark Robson’s The Harder ...”