“... awful’. Early memoirists take us further with Swift’s character, but only so far. His godson Thomas Sheridan recalled that ‘he always appeared to the world in a mask, which he never took off but in the company of his most intimate friends.’ Yet this unmasking, such as it was, only seems to have confused things further. The most memorable assessments ...”

“... for the wild, the wet and the non-artificial was most developed. Part of the achievement of Keith Thomas’s delightful new book is to explain these paradoxes. His central argument is that these are not real oppositions, but are linked as cause and effect. It was because of the urbanism, the industrialism and the general distancing and control of nature that ...”

“... Lewis Thomas is a physician, a scientist, a medical administrator, and a man of letters whose previous books, The Lives of a Cell (1974) and The Medusa and the Snail (1979), and occasional writing for the New England Journal of Medicine have brought him a large following. The Youngest Science will meet his fans’ highest expectations ...”

“... had an equivalent amount of random content removed. Two controls were required because there’s more than twice as much positive content as negative on Facebook. Posts were defined as either negative or positive depending on whether or not they included certain words, determined by a software package called Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count. Its ...”

“... life-threatening circumstances. If excitement is what a commercial pilot is after, he’s more likely to find it working bush planes in Africa, flying supplies and international aid workers to remote hospitals, or running drugs through South and Central America or over Eastern Europe. Langewiesche admonishes those who believe the landing on the Hudson ...”

“... hit the button.’ Not the button marked ‘launch baby whale,’ but the one that makes you sell more copies than OK!, Hello and Heat. Ennis thinks that ‘the celebrity thing is bound to bottom-out’ because ‘too many people are trying to jump onto it.’ When it does, she’ll no doubt head happily off to edit Cetacean Obstetrics Monthly; but what will ...”

“... A casual player might respond to an opponent’s ZO by saying: ‘Zo? What does that mean?’ A more advanced player would say nothing, and stick a D in front of it. In English, zo and dzo are alternative spellings of zho, a hybrid cow found in the Himalayas, the offspring of a domestic horned cow and a yak (the female is known as a zhomo). In English, zo ...”

“... written a study of the subject, though there is Barbara Trapido’s novel Brother of the More Famous Jack, and it’s one of the themes of John Lanchester’s first novel, The Debt to Pleasure. Among the many irritations must be to find yourself always referred to as so-and-so’s brother or sister, and to be written about as such by smart-arses. Ali ...”

“... the brief time this theoretical pasting took to compose and the age of the paster (would it be more acceptable coming from a 63-year-old?), the second half of Jack’s sentence decisively negates the first. Especially if the book in question is being lavishly praised elsewhere. Of course, if you’re its author or publisher, or the author’s best ...”

“... on the situation in Venezuela was printed in this journal. So no one can accuse us of anything more base than indiscretion for pointing these things out.) Still, as somebody advised in 1890, ‘never turn the spoon over and look at yourself in the bowl; it is the action of a clown.’The Diary of Eva Braun, with a commentary by Alan Bartlett, is appearing ...”

“... he was killed by a falling piece of timber in 1829. He had been married to his wife, Abigail, for more than twenty years. The medical students who performed the autopsy declared Allen’s body anatomically female, but the coroner continued to call the deceased ‘he’ because ‘I considered it impossible for him to be a woman, as he had a wife.’ The ...”

“... to their assured place in a Protestant society and culture, but that they told the story at all. Thomas Platter, the father, was persuaded by his son to record his memoirs; Felix, the son, kept a diary in which he recorded not only his achievements but, more important, the minutiae of his life. The result is a picture of ...”

“... overtures from Francis I promising a lucrative professorship. But Erasmus and Budé made it up, more or less. Why were Renaissance letter-writers so indiscreet? Their letters show that their message-bearers and servants were feckless, inclined to tipple or get into wrong company. When scholars were on friendly terms, it was courteous not to publish their ...”

“... of Mary Queen of Scots wasn’t written by Hilary Mantel or Antonia Fraser. It was written more than 140 years ago by James Anthony Froude, whose History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada put the Tudor show on the road. That wasn’t Froude’s only legacy. His Life of Carlyle, published in 1885, inaugurated modern ...”

“... language were ruder and less polished than those of their Continental counterparts. The translator Thomas Hoby called for writers to translate important works in order to enrich their own language, so that ‘we alone of the worlde maye not bee styll counted barbarous in our tunge, as in time out of minde we have bene in our maners’. For Hoby and his ...”