“... traditionally abound. But this was not the case, and indeed these letters suggest that Taylor had little but contempt for undigested piles of archive masquerading as history. This was because his own archival realism was always harnessed to a more complex and idiosyncratic process, which some would see as constituting Taylor’s peculiar contribution to the ...”

“... us witnessed Live Soccer on TV it was Juventus versus Liverpool in Brussels.In case this sounds a little over-sonorous, I ought to own up that on the night of the Brussels disaster, and for several days thereafter, my disposition was to defend ‘the game’ against sermonisers who seemed to be cashing in on what had happened: people who hated football anyway ...”

“... of the gods forestalled matricide by turning mother and son into constellations, the Great and Little Bear. Yet perhaps Diana herself did not get away with it? At the beginning of the passage in Metamorphoses where Actaeon blunders onto the bathing scene (a scene, as Brigid Brophy points out, which Titian represents as a stage, with players and ...”

“... When I came to study in Oxford in 1991, there were two stations. The working one, on top of its little mound; and another, fifty yards away, Oxford Rewley Road. Closed to passengers since 1951, it belonged first to the London and North Western Railway and then to the London Midland and Scottish Railway, whose name is marked on the frontage in old ...”

“... is often the word he uses, as here, in his short poem (a free version of the Latin poem by Arthur Johnston) about St Andrew’s, where he has lived with his family and worked for more than twenty years: I love how it comes right out of the blue North Sea edge, sunstruck with oystercatchers. A bullseye centred at the outer reaches, A haar of kirks, one ...”

“... secretary as he went down with the Titanic, though this is difficult to prove. The poet and critic Arthur Symons argued – in The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899) – that shadowy flickers of worlds ‘unseen’ might be as real as the invisible ‘reality’ of the atom. The reign of the ‘material’ was over; now came the turn of a literature in ...”

“... to enter into death with open eyes.’ The translation of M. Galey’s interviews has been made by Arthur Goldhammer, working with the nervous precision demanded by his knowledge that Mme Yourcenar is herself a fastidious translator: she has translated The Waves and What Maisie Knew into French. With Open Eyes is an engaging introduction to her work, imbued ...”

“... draughtsmanship. For that he had recourse to an unidentified draughtsman he called “Arthur”, and more often to Nicholas Hawksmoor, upon whose professional expertise he relied for the realisation of all his major buildings.’ The engineers, Arups, are Rogers’s Hawksmoor, Laurie Abbott and others his ‘...”

“... of the winners is a matter of vital importance.’Capital in the 21st Century, however, had very little to say about this ‘essential truth’, which we might call the problem of legitimacy. Instead, it provided an exhaustive description of the evolution of income and wealth inequality in industrialised countries over the last two hundred years. Its main ...”

“... he writes of a mythical bush creature.) And it has something, too, of Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, only that here the Blacks don’t live on the Pole: they have to take a ship to get there. ‘I had started on a voyage of discovery, only to find that it was I who was being discovered,’ Kpomassie realises once he finally ...”

“... author of Netherland. Largely it’s the names, not the work. You almost get the impression that Arthur Miller might have written After the Fall there, but it was mostly done in Connecticut; or that Kerouac might have written On the Road there, but that was mostly done on West 20th. Wolfe’s two posthumous novels, The Web and the Rock and You Can’t Go ...”

“... beast of entitlement. It’s a hard job, and maybe not the fairest one, to feign surprise, and a little indignation, when the Average Joe turns out to be His Royal Highness Prince Charles Philip Arthur George, Prince of Wales, KG, KT, GCB, OM, AK, QSO, PC, ADC, Earl of Chester, Duke of Cornwall, Duke of Rothesay, Earl of ...”

“... by panicking listeners falling downstairs and jumping out of windows in an effort to escape the little green men. The newspapers jumped on the bandwagon, calling for more government regulation of radio, much as they do now for television. When the Mercury Theatre’s Danton’s Death opened to mixed reviews the following week, they were quick to ...”

“... and energy, was a model for the blood-sucking count. Certainly Stoker’s dedication earned him little affection or respect. His friend the Manx writer Hall Caine said that he had ‘never seen, nor do I expect to see, such absorption of one man’s life in the life of another.’ Stoker’s was, he went on, ‘the strongest love that man may feel for ...”

“... the Ashmolean’s collection of copies of Greek antiquities, recently acquired by its keeper, Sir Arthur Evans, excavator of the palace of Knossos. Several objects, including a fragment of a mural showing a wasp-waisted Minoan jumping over the horns of a bull, she revisited again and again. ‘He seemed not to leap, but to hang above the bull, like a ...”