“... Kenner reveals, ‘had reference to cheese.’ Hard Cheddar, perhaps? The preliminary matters matter, then, but they are seldom simple; they are more often complex and occasionally bewildering in tone and intent, combining as they do effusive thanks and apologies, clawings, back-scratchings, denials, denunciations, and blank statements of disavowal (for ...”

“... who for Davie represents those qualities which in the earlier part of the anthology shine in Herbert and Vaughan, Watts and Wesley, Smart and Cowper. That none of these writers has the obvious ‘scale’ or bulk of a Browning is perhaps to Davie’s view less a detraction from their quality than an instance of it. For what he looks for in a Christian ...”

“... vent-widow. In the 1950s, an Australian singer who used to appear on stage with her vent-husband Herbert Dexter found that he was taking his dummy-insults and dummy-assaults too far both on stage and off, and sued him for divorce, reputedly citing the ‘miserable dummy’ as co-respondent. It is not surprising that Peter Brough once indulged in a bit of ...”

“... be given ‘latch-keys, bank accounts and shotguns’. (These were the words notoriously used by Herbert Morrison when he rejected the idea of self-government for some colonies in 1943: it would be like giving these things, he said, to ‘a child of ten’.) Britain needed to have completed the job. But that emphatically wasn’t the situation in most ...”

“... had shown it could be done, the pieces of the puzzle were available to anyone; it was only a matter of time before they would be properly reassembled. By the time the Soviet Union detonated an atomic explosion in 1949, the furor over atomic espionage was a manufactured fuss over open secrets. Still it was serious enough to damage Oppenheimer, even as it ...”

“... Wunderjahr papers in Annalen der Physik, changing the way physicists think about space, time and matter, had their centenary in 2005. All were duly marked, mainly by historians, philosophers and physicists, but there was nothing remotely approaching Darwin 200. Even if we had an unambiguous metric for ranking scientific genius and modernity-making – one by ...”

“... quest, relates how he and his wife survived the flood. ‘Let me reveal to you a closely guarded matter, Gilgamesh, And let me tell you the secret of the gods. Shuruppak is a city that you yourself know, Situated on the bank of the Euphrates. That city was already old when the gods within it Decided that the great gods should make a flood.’ However, the ...”

“... acts; feelings are recounted in the biography – depressions, infatuations, rages – but with a matter-of-factness appropriate to their subject. When depressed, Morgan summoned doctors, went on rest cures, travelled and got better. Unfulfilled in his second marriage (his first wife died of consumption shortly after their wedding), he took on ...”

“... I thought it was a strange view for someone who had been a refugee from Nazi Germany,’ Herbert Engelhardt, who lived downstairs, said. ‘I got the impression that Kissinger suffered less anti-semitism in his youth than I did as a kid in New Jersey.’ Mr Engelhardt is one of those simple souls who tends to blame American-Jewish paradox on ...”

“... canvas recalls Jed’s college girlfriend Geneviève, who worked as an escort with cheerful matter-of-factness and whose simple profession (‘with a supplement of one hundred euros for anal sex’) never provoked any misgivings on Jed’s part. One of the ‘Business Compositions’, however, defeats even Jed’s extraordinary draughtsmanship: Damien ...”

“... usually trespass, criminal damage or a breach of the Public Order Act. Arson is a different matter. It’s hard to believe that such a serious crime could have been authorised, retrospectively or otherwise. But it’s harder still to believe that Lambert’s actions were unknown to senior officers, his handler at the very least. Lambert led two ...”

“... to one of its historical disguises, to this or that behaviour, this or that set of symptoms. As a matter of fact, the hysteria to which Mitchell refers (the Cain complex, the reaction to the identity trauma etc) is not a thing open to observation: it is a theoretical construct intended to account for a multitude of phenomena among which some have ...”

“... will starve to death if we take out from the country whatever we need.’ It was written by Herbert Backe, state secretary of the Reich Ministry for Food and Agriculture. While the memo left the number of victims blank, Backe’s arithmetic suggested that the entire urban population of the European Soviet Union – thirty million ‘surplus ...”

“... other’. Ethnicity is most commonly understood as something richer and more specific than race: a matter of shared cultures, languages, traditions and beliefs. Kaufmann’s frame of reference is both too broad and too narrow. On the one hand, the cultures and histories of the countries he writes about are plainly not uniform. The US is a former settler colony ...”

“... of blessings’ – the title of the novel she appears in. (The quotation is borrowed from George Herbert, one of Pym’s favourite poets.) Gently mocking self-love, Pym’s novels find redemption in commonplace pleasures – though without sanctimony. ‘The trivial round, the common task,’ Belinda repeats from Keble’s hymn ‘New Every Morning Is the ...”