“... war of attrition. Nowadays most people blame this on the stupidity of the wartime generals, but Richard Holmes’s sensible biography of Sir John French should give them pause. Like most of the British High Command, French was a cavalryman who had made his reputation on the open fields of colonial warfare. He dreamed that one day massed horsemen would ...”

“... not only with two serious recent biographies, of Wordsworth by Stephen Gill and of Coleridge by Richard Holmes, but with Susan Eilenberg’s persuasive book-length treatment of this very subject. Mason underplays the psychological interest of Wordsworth’s unceremonious takeover of the second edition, and (surely) its effect on Coleridge. He atones ...”

“... could be dismissed as not especially consequential. In Volcanoes: Crucibles of Change (1997), Richard Fisher, Grant Heiken and Jeffrey Hulen devote only half a sentence to it: ‘The dust cloud … lasted less than two years, and its effects upon the environment, though harmful to people, were short-lived.’ But Wood, who intends no hyperbole in his ...”

“... of the poetry have followed this tendency: it is not rare now for critics like, for instance, Richard Holmes in his agreeable volumes of biography, to find Coleridge’s crown as a poet among the ‘Conversation Poems’ – quietly meditative post-Cowper colloquial writing such as ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’, and ‘Frost at ...”

“... argument, as there are, however, in recent alternatives to it. In his Shelley: The Pursuit (1974) Richard Holmes decided that both Claire and Elise had been pregnant by Shelley, that Claire’s pregnancy had aborted, and Elena was Elise’s baby. Claire Tomalin, in Shelley and His World (1980) argued more reasonably that the child was Claire’s; and in ...”

“... In the opening chapter of A Study in Scarlet Dr Watson is introduced to Sherlock Holmes. Holmes says, ‘How are you?’ and adds: ‘You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.’ Watson asks in astonishment: ‘How on earth did you know that?’ and Holmes, ‘chuckling to himself’, answers: ‘Never mind ...”

“... to insist on his greatness? Because Coleridge isn’t in this book, in the way that he isin Richard Holmes’s recent, sensitive profile in the Oxford ‘Past Masters’ series. Does a study like Levere’s miss some point, or is one merely making an obvious remark about the difference between ‘biography’ and ‘intellectual history’? Authors ...”

“... romance about a man, the heiress he loves and an anthropomorphic cat – comes from Jack Holmes, a handsome, closeted editorial assistant who works with him at a literary quarterly in Manhattan. Jack is in love with Will, but his ardent affection and oversized penis fail to bend Will’s heterosexuality. Jack holds out hope that Will’s novel may ...”

“... was written as he sailed or weltered on that sea which was soon to engulf him.’ His biographer Richard Holmes thinks ‘he wrote it partly on the boat, and partly in his study at night … The writing is in ink, unusually large for Shelley, and bleached by sun.’ Reiman thought the lack of water damage to the manuscript argued against its having been ...”

“... letters supposedly showing Parnell’s complicity in the Phoenix Park murders had been forged by Richard Pigott. The Commission Report did seem to support the Tory case that Irish agrarian violence had been in part because of, and not in spite of, the Land League’s advocacy of non-violent action. But after the Pigott debacle who was ready to make capital ...”

“... to the country to take up bee-keeping, and only one other such person did that – Sherlock Holmes. Another such person, who left the Service – ‘D16 as they call it now’ – after ‘the fracas with the KGB in Cheltenham’, gets restive in his Cotswold retreat. ‘I had felt like Mole all that day,’ he says, innocently referring to The Wind in ...”

“... gentleman’s dress suit. It might almost be mistaken for the dénouement of an early Sherlock Holmes story: Dr John H. Watson describing the scene in an East End police station when Holmes literally unmasks the man with an old scar running across his face from eye to chin which turned up his lip into a perpetual ...”

“... life, the old man gave them to the soul to protect its feet whilst crossing the thorny moor. Richard Blakeborough, Wit, Character, Folklore and Customs of the North Riding of Yorkshire (1911) I was back walking on Lothersdale Moor, through ling, blackthorn and blips of sheepshit, over dry-stone walls and up kestrels’ airstreams, back with the becks ...”

“... and America. One of the few geologists convinced by the evidence for continental drift was Arthur Holmes at the University of Durham. In 1927, he suggested that the radioactive elements heating the Earth’s interior could provide the power to move continents. The hot rocks would rise, then fall when they reached the cooler upper layers, creating a convection ...”

“... anxiety in most beholders. Take the carpet of jagged slates spread by (or to the order of) Richard Long through Duveen’s sculpture hall, as seen in the photograph on Spalding’s dust-jacket. The elect smile serenely at the attractive pattern. Others pick their way around it with care, propping their minds open, nervously feigning a relish, gradually ...”