“... the word ‘pardon’. Of the good people in Northanger Abbey and Persuasion we know nothing more than what is written; for before those works were published their author had been taken away from us, and all such amusing communications had ceased for ever. In the days before Hollywood sequels Jane Austen enthralled her young relations by telling them ...”

“... breaking with family but of entering a man’s domain on equal terms. So, too, with the slightly more ambiguously gendered Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. As in surgery, literary sex change is an ugly operation and female chauvinists must rejoice to see a complete turn of the wheel in those areas of fiction where the practice is still necessary. When the Texan ...”

“... would bring the reader up short with an aperçu. His new pamphlet is a bit like that, except with more hype and hucksterism and fewer footnotes. You can take the temperature of the writing from the very opening passage, where it is stated that ‘We have placed men on the moon, yet ... ’ In my experience, this is the unvarying prelude to a mass of ...”

“... peers in formal intricacy and praise of his lady. Their poetics required a donna angelicata, often more symbol than person. As a pretext for the poet’s introspection and romantic projections, the lady could signify anything from divine wisdom to poetic glory; she didn’t even have to exist. Dante, however, was shaken to the core when his adored Beatrice ...”

“... out of the language by insisting that it conform to classical models that did not fit modern life. More recently still, students of humanism have fought back, insisting on the virtues of the humanists’ intelligent classicism. Formidable scholars like the Belgian Latinist Jozef Ijsewijn have trained students in the literary Latin of the Renaissance and later ...”

“... copies of his poems, Coleridge noted, were ‘grievously misprinted. Wonderful that they are not more so, considering that not one in a thousand of his readers has any notion how his lines are to be read.’ In the wake of Coleridge’s enthusiasm Donne found a number of 19th-century admirers, but it was only in the late Victorian and Edwardian years that ...”

“... a unique form of scientific access to the living stomach, but throughout the 19th century ever more powerful technologies were being devised to get at its contents and to render it visible, audible and, finally, manipulable. Physicians became more skilled in such non-invasive techniques as auscultation, learning to ...”

“... he told me that thanks to the Nigerian bomber he had been visited by the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. Friedman, having asked his questions, went back to the US and told his readers that the city ‘was not Kabul … yet’, but that AQAP was a ‘virus’ that needed urgent attention before the spread of the disease became uncontrollable. He ...”

“... but I at the same time think the process of modulation and inflection may be quite as complete, or more so, without the external enunciation; and that an author had better try the effect of his sentences on his stomach than on his ear. This is Hazlitt’s way of avoiding claptrap; he’s pleased, for instance, that Shakespeare ‘did not sacrifice the truth ...”

“... sliced-thin sentences leaving a trail of stitches – maximalists like Moody follow the lead of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo by wiring themselves into consumer culture, conspiracy theory, pop iconography and spy-craft technology, trying to chart an underlying pattern in the chaos, a treasure map of paranoia. Purple America, Moody’s major-statement novel ...”

“... is pushing from behind on an imperceptible descent. Armstrong, predictably, looks different – more compact and pugilistic. A few days later, an expert on France 2 with a freeze-frame monitor and a felt-tip pen will analyse the eerily aerodynamic shape of the Armstrong back. The words bionique, incroyable and extraterrestre are used, hinting at unfair ...”

“... claim that the earth floated on water, and that earthquakes were caused by wave-tremors. What’s more, philosophers of this period knew and criticised one another’s ideas. Thales believed that the originating principle of all things was water, Anaximander that it was a boundless, primordial mass (apeiron), and Anaximenes that it was air. Unlike the ...”

“... The Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass in 1937. They are called stories but in fact are more like chapters of an unfinished novel. They don’t proceed in the way you might expect a story to proceed, certainly not with obvious beginnings or endings. In ‘Nimrod’, about a puppy, the prose mooches around the way a puppy might mooch, with bursts of ...”

“... article, asserts that ‘Franklin never thought science was as important as public service.’ More patronising still, Franklin is presented as a tinkerer who didn’t really understand the science. Walter Isaacson, in his popular Life, declares that ‘Franklin had a feel for the mechanical workings of the world but little appreciation for abstract ...”

“... by the editions of Nicholas Rowe (1709), Alexander Pope (1725), Lewis Theobald (1733), Sir Thomas Hanmer (1744) and William Warburton (1747) – and each had been able to offer what a modern commissioning editor would call a Unique Selling Point. The First Folio had supplied 18 plays which had never been printed before, quite apart from an authorised ...”