“... drawn verbatim from this book, was among the papers seized at Thomas Kyd’s lodgings on 11 May 1593. These ‘vile hereticall conceipts’, as the investigators called them, were found to be Marlowe’s. They had got ‘shuffled’ with Kyd’s papers when the two writers were sharing a chamber in 1591. A week later Marlowe was himself summoned before ...”

“... writing, the long and intricate continuities from draft to draft that we find, say, in Proust. We may guess that the seepage must take place somehow, if that’s our biographical theory, but we certainly don’t see it. We do see something other than Stendhal’s mistakes, however. We see him cruising, so to speak: not in the workshop but on the prowl. We see ...”

“... British people that it has been made out to be. This optimistic analysis is hard to endorse. It may well be, as Hirst reports, that popular support for the principles of the National Health Service is still ‘overwhelming’. It may well still be the case, as it was in 1987, that fewer than 5 per cent of the population ...”

“... to the People), a party recently formed by Nikolai Ryzhkov, the former Soviet prime minister, may also get about 5 per cent. The Agrarian Party and Women of Russia tend to vote with the Communists. If the rule which stipulates that a party must receive at least 5 per cent of the vote to have any representation is revoked – it is presently under ...”

“... desuetude which is uniquely theirs. Rosen’s procedures for the analysis of a cultural period may be too little thought through, too entertained by free-wheeling analogies and ‘look-at-this’ correspondences, too scanting of the immense and very useful scholarship on the material, but they are often stunningly effective for looking at aspects of the ...”

“... moving to Provincetown, in love with interior decoration and planning the future. And then, in May 1989, they both took the test, Wally tested positive and began to die. ‘At nine o’clock on a weekday morning, late in May 1989, the public health care worker who’d come to tell us our test results blasted the world ...”

“... everywhere or total erasure. In such a mood your memory itself becomes a double agent, and you may be ready, like the hero of Orson Welles’s Mr Arkadin, to hire a private eye to explore your own past or, like the hero of Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s The Club Dumas, to welcome the devil as your research assistant. You could also just read one of the ...”

“... Two ten-year-old boys, truanting from school, go to a Liverpool shopping-centre. They stole, or may have stolen, ‘a pen, a packet of batteries, Humbrol enamel paint tins, sausage rolls, party poppers ... a troll ... a packet of iced gems, a balloon, a plum, a pear, a banana’. Think of the young Jean-Jacques Rousseau, trying to steal apples; standing ...”

“... are two difficulties here. One, the less important, is that Grosseteste was of humble origin. It may be no more than a story that he had to beg his bread as a boy, after the death of his widowed mother, but almost all of the early writers who mention him remark on his low birth – which suggests that a lowborn bishop was as unusual as a one-armed ...”

“... District Archives. Like Fanny Burney, Anne Lister had in mind ‘a private memorial that I may hereafter read, perhaps with a smile, when Time has frozen up the channel of those sentiments which flow so freshly now’. The diary which she was to write is concerned, in inverse order of importance, with everyday matters, provincial ...”

“... be relied on to put you first. This is a discovery everyone makes sooner or later: if sooner you may end up a little bitter and twisted, but you will avoid great disappointment; if later you will almost certainly take to your word-processor and key in the story of your life. Historians in the present worry that historians in the future will be overwhelmed by ...”

“... question, when what is considered to be beyond the realm of choice is discovered not to be. One may think, as one reads Wieseltier’s book, that what people are capable of doing, or indeed should do, to improve their lives has already been decided. So Kaddish is often driven by an exhausted realism, a seeing-through modern life which is presented as the ...”

“... of dinosaurs in three little words: ‘big, fierce, extinct’. The first and third concepts may be causally related: it may be that dinosaurs no longer have any expanse in time because they had such a great expanse in space; they may have become extinct because they were ...”

“... of news creation and distribution. Like everything associated with him (including, one may predict, his imminent disappearance from the scene), it has happened very fast. He is 31 years old, and has been in full-time business three years. He was born in Washington DC, the offspring of ‘liberal’ parents: his father, as Matt recalls, was ‘one ...”

“... If, that is, a ‘memory’ is some kind of private mental property. The picture I have of her may be faintly tinted by first-hand experience, but its contours come from public documentation. Through biographies, critical writings and the tourist phenomenon of her home at Charleston, Vanessa has become a cultural commodity, and it’s this commodity I ...”