“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... could one know that this was the way people wanted to live; rather than, say, the life they’d more or less unwillingly adapted to? Looking out of the car window, I would have had to conclude that a great number of people want to spend much of their time driving in and out of Birmingham on a badly designed racetrack bordered by establishments that will fit ...”

“... he had seen William’s future bride. Another version attributes the discovery to the philosopher Thomas Davidson, who invited his friend to meet ‘the woman you ought to marry’. It may not be clear who saw her first, but everyone seems to have agreed that Alice Howe Gibbens was destined for William James. Having followed up the proffered advice, William ...”

“... matter of Pushkin, Emily Brontë Is the best analogy in some ways Among our poets. But Pushkin is more various than Brontë, apparently, more resourceful in relation to the wider circuit of experience available to him. Poetry for Pushkin was a means of circumventing the spleen. Unforcedly assenting to each experience as a ...”

“... the Euphrates’, the actual kingdom of Judah, from which the term ‘Jew’ derives, was never more than a hilltop duchy some thirty miles across. Yet today it is the coastal plain, formerly the haunt of the Philistines, that is in the hands of the Zionists, and Judah for the most part is in the hands of the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. So what ...”