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“... because it presented ‘what oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed’ (to quote Alexander Pope)? Or was it, perish the thought, a ‘quotation’ for the simple reason that it had appeared in earlier books of quotations, and so could be ripped off by buccaneers like Bartlett?The preface to the third edition of the Oxford Dictionary in 1979 ...”

“... of a famous “academic career”’ and for a while could find nothing else. He was rescued by Alexander Gerschenkron, an émigré from Russia who had met him at Berkeley, been impressed by his expertise and command of languages, and asked if he’d like to take charge of research on Western Europe for the Federal Reserve. This was perfect. He and Sarah ...”

“... a secret as an unwanted answer to an uncompelling mystery. Like the most extraordinary couture, Alexander McQueen’s designs, say. You delight in and admire them, gorgeously and dramatically displayed in the videos of professional mannequins on runways, but you don’t want to see them in everyday action, being worn disappointingly as clothes, in real ...”

“... style, published The Nobleman, Gentleman and Gardener’s Recreation and when Brown was three, Alexander Pope, who believed that ‘all gardening is landscape painting,’ began work on the house and grounds at Twickenham which he continued to alter and write about for the rest of his life. Gardening of this sort was not only painting, it was also from the ...”

“... government of the day. The OBR was set up to correct that tendency. To run it, Osborne brought in Robert Chote, who had been head of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a highly respected think tank which analyses government tax and spending plans and reports on them in a spirit of Cassandra-meets-Scrooge. In June 2010, the OBR predicted that the UK economy ...”

“... must explain her hazardous use of words. She’d met Sandy, her husband, when he drove one of the Alexander buses about the town of Elgin. She happened to be the clippy on the same bus, and she would often tell me about the beauty of those single-decker vehicles (‘the Bluebird’) and the handsomeness of Sandy behind the wheel. Now she was furious all the ...”

“... a Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield (c.1590), Antony Munday’s two-part Downfall and Death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon (1598) and Jonson’s unfinished Sad Shepherd – remember or re-enact the paradigmatic story of Robin Hood. In George Peele’s Edward I, the Welsh bandit Prince Lluellen and his followers give their cause a veneer of mischievous ...”

“... Louis IX under the Treaty of Paris, peace with Llywelyn in Wales, with another brother-in-law, Alexander II in Scotland. The only man with whom he never came to a lasting understanding was Montfort (yet another brother-in-law).In short, nothing could be less like the conventional idea of a pugnacious Plantagenet than the fair nine-year-old child who came ...”

“... what they have increasingly come to regard as an embarrassing anachronism. When the manager Robert Newman and the young Henry Wood inaugurated an eight-week season of Promenade Concerts in 1895, they were not doing anything very novel. Such ‘promenades’ had been a permanent yet ephemeral part of London cultural life for the best part of sixty ...”

“... cash poor and land rich,’ he said. ‘And who needs more second-growth pine and manzanita?’ Alexander Pope, in his upstream exile at Twickenham, laid out garden and grotto as a conceit, an extension of his work into the world, and a powerful attractor for patrons and lesser talents. To fund the Sierra reinhabitation, as Snyder saw it, he took on reading ...”

“... 1960s, the comic-book landscape was being altered by the ‘underground comix’ movement, led by Robert Crumb. Among Crumb’s most popular creations are the suave adventurer Fritz the Cat (whose conquests include a female ostrich and his own sister) and Mr Natural, a fountainhead of exasperatingly vague advice, outfitted in a Tolstoyan beard and ...”

“... attract capital and keep it, and for a significant number of the citizens of every country. Even Robert Rubin, Secretary to the United States Treasury, is anxious about the tendency of the dispersed intelligences to move as a herd and amplify the oscillations. This is not to say that the financial interests of what the economist Jagdish Bhagwati, no enemy of ...”

“... because he is the least known of the writer-critics, and his French is often not straightforward. Robert Baldick, biographer of Huysmans (1955) and translator of his most famous novel, À Rebours, described his style as ‘one of the strangest literary idioms in existence’. Léon Bloy, a fellow writer and fellow Catholic, described it as ‘continually ...”

“... expressed pity for the poor women on the street, but many viewed them with misogynist contempt. Robert Fabian, a former London superintendent, wrote in his memoirs that ‘the whore is a bad apple … there is a big brown bruise on her soul, of self-indulgence and selfishness.’ But traffickers and pimps were also vile: ‘the lowest form of animal life on ...”

“... against so many.This simile was much reviled by neoclassical critics. In his translation of 1726 Alexander Pope couldn’t bring himself to mention the sausage, and produced instead one of his prissiest euphemisms: ‘As one who long with pale-ey’d famine pin’d,/The sav’ry cates on glowing embers cast.’ Odysseus has returned to Ithaca and is still ...”