“... the mid-18th century; but despite a lineage that included her aunt, Sarah Siddons, her father, Charles, and her uncle, the great tragedian John Philip Kemble, Fanny herself was deeply ambivalent towards the theatre. She first aspired to be a writer rather than an actress; and it was only when the family faced bankruptcy that the latest Kemble was swiftly ...”

“... Pears were notorious for cutting people out of their lives (Eric Crozier is mentioned here, and Charles Mackerras), friends and acquaintances suddenly turned into living corpses if they overstepped the mark. A joke would do it, and though Britten seems to have had plenty of childish jokes with his boy singers, his sense of humour isn’t much in evidence ...”

“... ball is extraordinary. Even in poor smuggled English, the accuracy of the original can be felt. In Charles Johnston’s version: Here with his wife, that bulging charmer, fat Pustiakov has driven in; Gvozdin, exemplary farmer, whose serfs are miserably thin; and the Skotinins, grizzled sages, with broods of children of all ages, from thirty down to two; and ...”

“... from the lucrative overland routes to Asia, European merchants and explorers sought an alternative passage around the cape of Africa. In the process, they stumbled on a new supply of enslaved peoples made available by black traders on the African coast. They also encountered the indigenous Canary Islanders, the Guanche, who acted as guinea pigs for New World ...”

“... what contribution the head gardeners of these select country houses made to garden history, such a passage is virtually meaningless. Moreover, serious slippages occur in the course of their discussion which reveal the authors’ confusion in attributing this entire garden ‘vocabulary’ to the head gardeners of the few estates described in the book’s ...”

“... arguments which might have been addressed acceptably to the Court of King’s Bench in the time of Charles I.   I know of only one authority which might justify the suggested method of construction: ‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less’ ... After all this ...”

“... dust-jacket to Forty Stories mentions Pynchon and Beckett, but this is the world of Thurber and Charles Addams. Barthelme’s more serious intentions were made clear from the start. In ‘Marie, Marie, hold on tight’ (a story not to be found here but in his first book Come back, Dr Caligari) three protestors picket a New York church, in order to ...”

“... that Trollope’s actual fiction has gone the oblivious way of Surtees’s, or Mrs Oliphant’s or Charles Lever’s. The Penguin English Library, the Dover reprint series and the new paperback World’s Classics have returned an impressive number of the 47 novels to print. A new and complete edition of the letters (edited by N. John Hall) is about to take ...”

“... any of Gladstone’s letters. In fact, Manning wished his biographer to be J.E.C. Bodley, Sir Charles Dilke’s private secretary, but he may well not have said so to Purcell. Yet, with every allowance made, Purcell does seem to have behaved in a manner that was none too scrupulous. He persuaded the curators of Manning’s papers at the Church of St Mary ...”

“... world.’ The experience which resonates most memorably in Amis’s five novels is described by Charles Highway, narrator of The Rachel Papers: ‘One of the troubles with being over-articulate, with having a vocabulary more developed than your emotions, is that every turn in the conversation, every switch of posture, opens up an estate of verbal avenues ...”

“... faced down conservative prejudice to offer work to a Jewish refugee like him. His Yale colleague Charles Hendel was relieved to find that Cassirer was ‘not a prima donna’ (unlike ‘many European professors’), and indeed that he ‘liked his students’ and was working on his spoken English in the hope of better serving them. Cassirer had always been ...”

“... women writers (Sarah Orne Jewett, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edith Wharton), African-Americans (Charles Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar) and immigrants (Abraham Cahan). He also introduced US readers to foreign literature. British literature was already widely read in the cheap reprints that proliferated before the ...”

“... and Latin sources and his knowledge of the French archaeological excavations of the city, begun by Charles Beulé in the 1850s. As Miles’s photographs make clear, even Blaine’s drawings of 1927 – Salammbô’s diaphanous gown and towering headdress, the horned helmet of the Punic god Melqart, the priests sacrificing a child to Baal – were influenced by ...”

“... intimately entwined. ‘Space-time’ acts like a medium in which objects are distorted and the passage of time slowed when massive bodies such as planets and stars are present. In the jargon, space-time is ‘warped’. When galaxies collide or stars explode, the warping changes and the disturbance spreads out in ‘gravitational waves’ travelling at the ...”

“... Kelly lingers thoughtfully at the landmarks Herzen passed on his intellectual and political passage through the first half of the 19th century: Schiller, Hegel, Saint-Simon, Fourier, George Sand, Feuerbach, Louis Blanc and, crucially, Proudhon. The young Herzen, awed and fascinated by European ideas and achievements, tended to blame the tsars for his ...”