“... besides. When the Bill making the registration of births compulsory was introduced in 1836, Lord John Russell, recommending it to Parliament, said that everyone would ‘so soon perceive the benefit of having their children’s names inserted in the general register that it would not be very long before every one would be willing to concur in carrying out ...”

“... Still, there is only one staggering omission. He describes the genesis of physiology under Michael Foster but never mentions Adrian, Hodgkin or Huxley, all Nobel Laureates and masters of Trinity, who immediately after the war worked in the most prestigious biological department which pullulated with FRS. The greatest change in social life? Brooke is in no ...”

“... a mature ethics might take generations to formulate. ‘Actions are right,’ the utilitarian John Stuart Mill wrote, ‘in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.’ At times, however, duty and the general happiness seem to be in conflict. If a recently dead husband had been leading a secret ...”

“... her in ways I couldn’t easily articulate … long before I discovered that Marilyn had been a foster child.’Looks, and being looked at, became an issue very early on. The first flasher of many revealed himself when she was eight, she thinks – ‘because of their frequency … these kinds of incidents started to feel almost normal’ – and she was ...”

“... Like Eggers (whose memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, was puffed by Moody), David Foster Wallace and William T. Vollmann, Moody spurns the eye-dropper technique of minimalism that was fashionable when he was a nervous colt in the 1980s in favour of a bachelor-guy pack-rat approach where everything the author has ever seen, read, felt or heard ...”

“... of the labour aristocracy. This is the more significant because it forms the core of the thesis of John Foster’s justly celebrated book on Oldham, Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution. In Oldham, it was held, the move from political radicalism to class stability depended essentially upon the emergence of abstinent labour aristocrats, like the ...”

“... books. She also wrote poems (much less good than the novels) and studies of Mary Shelley and John Masefield, whose narrative verse she admired. She then had a protracted bust-up with Stanford, which had its origins in what was to prove the foundational crisis in her life. In late 1953 she was taking too much Dexedrine, which she used as an appetite ...”

“... more (or less) might be involved. We were entirely separate. This was not an environment to foster a broad or balanced social view. In the more public services such a view could be fostered simply by contact – however vicarious – with the outside world. In the secret services – just like Oxbridge colleges – it appears this didn’t apply. Edward ...”

“... reconcile themselves to the new state of affairs, but by no means all. The political scientist John Whyte pointed out that ‘for civil war to break out, it is not necessary for a majority of inhabitants to desire it.’ Small groups can carry out sectarian assassinations that provoke reprisals and counter-reprisals. Protestant paramilitary groups ...”

“... the Elizabeth Montagu set, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the Duchess of Devonshire or Lady Elizabeth Foster; the Duchess’s novel Sylph is not treated, either. In the second half of the book, ‘Literary Achievements’, we are on firmer ground: but here the first seven chapters concern novels already partially rescued by inclusion in the Oxford English ...”

“... offering a service people really want. Otherwise they will be reduced to the didactic posture of John Reith or Matthew Arnold, pretending to know better than people themselves what is good for them. This idea, in the Thatcherite spring of the 1980s, lent pro-market advocacy its anti-elitist patina. The efficiency argument is just as familiar. Take a ...”

“... must be partly the help more recently given by such learned work on the art of inscriptions as John Sparrow’s, whose Visible Words, Line upon Line and Lapidaria are gratefully quoted in this and the following paragraph. For some three hundred years after the mid-15th century, a new art born in Italy swept Europe, accompanying the greater visual ...”

“... ship was put back on an even keel. Curiously, although the Grosart debacle, fully documented in John Bicknell’s edition of Stephen’s letters, is briefly mentioned in Alan Bell’s exemplary entry on Stephen in the ODNB, these misdemeanours make no appearance in Arthur Sherbo’s entry on Grosart. Thereafter, the DNB maintained its announced schedule ...”

“... Administration. The great cult film of all time in this respect is George Axelrod’s and John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate, withdrawn from circulation after the Kennedy assassination but now available again in cassette form. And the great artistic and emblematic coincidence of the movie is the playing of the good guy by Frank Sinatra ...”

“... It is a great irony that he must finally consort with cowards.Unusually for Yeats, as Roy Foster notes in his biography, the poem didn’t need many drafts. After a dream, he dictated a prose version to his wife. The poem begins with a set of clear statements, free of metaphor, tonally stark. The first stanza has assertive single-syllable words ...”