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“... As we arrived, an Arctic fox, snow-white and no bigger than a cat, scampered behind a small ridge. In previous years, the fox would not have been stranded, apparently without food, because first-year ice would already have formed across the surface of the ocean. With the ice disappearing, the currents and narrow channels pose less of an impediment ...”

“... covering it with a cloth during trading hours, and sold candles and wax votive offerings from a small shop next to the market with which shoppers supplicated the Virgin to intercede for a successful harvest.In 1304, a fire broke out in Orsanmichele – possibly an arson attack, given the intense infighting between government factions at the time. The image ...”

“... not hold him back. He kept up his skating, fishing and walking, and his first biographer Leslie Stephen tells us that ‘in later years he was constantly to be encountered upon the roads round Cambridge.’ Rarely in conversation did he refer to his blindness, and when it was adduced to explain any inaccuracy he was not pleased. ‘Fawcett’s triumph over ...”

“... with other analogous predicaments. D’Aguiar himself takes as the epigraph to his introduction Stephen Dedalus’s description of Irish art from Ulysses, ‘The cracked lookingglass of a servant’ – a turn of phrase which Stephen immediately realises may be both apt and marketable. Dabydeen and all other poets who ...”

“... Brenda Maddox’s use of them in her book on Nora, and the iron curtain which in retaliation Stephen Joyce has dropped around his grandfather’s flame. In Professor A.N. Other’s hands, this would have been a duller and more comprehensively researched book. Probably F.R. Leavis is long enough dead (although the keepers of his gem-like flame remain ...”

“... which nevertheless has many good things in it. Nine essays, mostly dealing with single pictures or small related groups, necessarily offer a patchy view of the period from 1700 to 1850. The unity of the book depends on the coherence or otherwise of its critical position. This John Barrell describes in his Foreword as a new approach, developed over the past ten ...”

“... Butters’s The Triumph of Vulcan (1996), which includes a photograph of the English sculptor Stephen Cox (born 1946), stripped to the waist, caressing the smooth flanks of the quarry on Mons Porphyrites. Cox was the first person since antiquity to obtain porphyry from this source, and a huge chunk of it, partly worked by him and partly by Roman quarry ...”

“... literary and mythological allegories. In The Crisis of 1614, essays by Jonathan Gibson and Stephen Clucas show Ralegh’s cousin Sir Arthur Gorges adapting Lucan’s verse history of Rome’s civil wars, and Jonson’s friend Sir Robert Cotton rewriting the reign of Henry III, with an eye to Jacobean political anxieties. Cotton was among the most ...”

“... between Tony Blair and George W. Bush delayed things by a year. In 2014 it was agreed that a ‘small number of full extracts from the minutes of [Cabinet] meetings’ thought to be ‘most critical’ could be published. The sensitivity of the Blair/Bush correspondence – it was claimed that disclosure could make future leaders chary of frank discussion ...”

“... 1980, the European Parliament returned to the attack. By a shrewd procedural device, it voted only small changes in the 1981 budget – but a huge supplementary budget for 1980, enabling the Community to spend on regional and employment aid in 1981 most of what the Governments had previously refused. Taken aback, the Governments couldn’t muster a big enough ...”

“... well before the deadline, and often in person. A new editorial assistant, handed copy by the small seventy-five-year-old in a deerstalker who had scaled the steep stairs to our earlier offices, decided he must be a Mercury messenger. In these Diaries Taylor wrote about the early days of CND, his contempt for the New English Bible, his delight in nude ...”

“... we learn that his beloved ‘blues’ are not glorious, fugitive slices of heaven, but a small-winged, drab, obscurely differentiated tribe which includes a great number of widely-distributed species. So why choose them? Presumably because he was serious, in love with difficult identifications – and because this rapidly differentiating family held ...”

“... that the Red Sox lost game seven as well. Bill Buckner moved to Idaho. Oh, the curse! Yet, as Stephen Jay Gould points out in an essay in this posthumous collection of his baseball writings, it was not Buckner’s fault that the Red Sox lost the Series. When Buckner made his mistake, Boston had already blown their lead (on a wild pitch, though almost no ...”

“... survive because, despite its merits, it ‘mimes transgression but never crosses the boundary’. Stephen Haggard’s Nya is the story of the love between a young man and a 13-year-old girl. Readers of Lolita will imagine such a book as a hotbed of sexual and linguistic transgression. But in Nya nothing untoward happens. Sexual innocence is not even tempted ...”

“... out in more than one long exhausting walk and vigorous playful tussles, was unwearying.’ Leslie Stephen, one of Meredith’s friends, eulogised the effects of an invigorating tramp in the country in the true spirit: ‘You can consume your modest sandwiches, light your pipe, and feel more virtuous, and thoroughly at peace with the universe, than it is easy ...”