“... And just as Gresham College, home of the Royal Society, was buzzing with the stooped mutterings of Robert Boyle, John Aubrey and Robert Hooke, so, Wall suggests, the unknown woman at home, experimenting with endive and plantin, or (in Partridge’s words) trussing woodcocks ‘into the Coffyn with swete larde around ...”

“... GPA and Jewish antecedents. Some sperm firms offer discounts for the holiday season (‘Though it may not be the most traditional gift …’), and put up money-shots of their ‘donor of the month’ online. At the other end of the life cycle, as Sandel tells us, ‘viatical’ firms in the US take on unwanted life insurance policies en bloc from seniors in ...”

“... It would be hard,’ Robert Frost wrote, ‘to gather biography from poems of mine except as they were all written by the same person, out of the same general region north of Boston, and out of the same books.’ Frost’s biographers, who began their collective labours well before he died, were not to be put off by such a statement, and the early collections of memoirs and reminiscences culminated in Lawrance Thompson’s three-volume biography published between 1966 and 1976 ...”

“... his life, obediently reinforcing the English stereotype of the feckless Mick. Of course Heathcliff may not be Irish at all. He may be a gypsy, or a lascar, or (like Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre) a creole. It is hard to know how black he is, or rather how much of the blackness is grime and bile and how much pigmentation. As for ...”

“... to report on the world is still very fashionable, and in that sense Norman Gash’s book on Robert Surtees goes against the grain of present-day literary analysis. It does not go against the traditional grain of writing about Surtees, a novelist who has almost always been praised simply as a reporter of the English scene in the mid-19th century, even on ...”

“... Here was a then-regular sodality, consisting at different times of Kingsley Amis, Bernard Levin, Robert Conquest, Anthony Powell, Russell Lewis and assorted others, and calling itself with heavy and definite self-mockery ‘Bertorelli’s Blackshirts’. The conversational scheme was simple (I think it had evolved from a once-famous letter to the Times ...”

“... Robert Altman’s Short Cuts is a long, loose-looking movie, but the looseness is an effect, carefully worked for. Plenty of themes recur throughout – insecurity, chance, rage, damage, the long, bruising war between men and women – and although there are fourteen or fifteen stories here (based on extrapolated from ten stories by Raymond Carver – the handouts and the introduction solemnly say nine stories and a poem, but the so-called poem is also a prose narrative), they are intricately stitched together, like a miniaturised Comédie humaine set in Los Angeles ...”

“... in the light of the earlier discussion, at what it is that gives value to our lives, and at how we may be able to use this knowledge to enhance and enrich them. In general, the book is written elegantly (more so than the accurate but mouth-filling title would suggest) and with humour. Glover’s views come across as committedly liberal and pluralist ...”

“... other crimes, including doing barely credible damage to the Duke of Norfolk’s deer-park – he may have thought it was Buckingham’s – twice breaking into Combe Abbey to steal its goods and insult the abbot, and repeatedly mustering large numbers of armed men to lead in theft, raid, or riot. High points of his career include breaking out of prison at ...”

“... and, manifestly lacking the endorsement of millions of otherwise law-abiding citizens – there may be twelve million users in the USA – compromises respect for the law and the police. Lester Grinspoon and James Bakalar’s argument, however, is that marijuana should be legalised because of its medicinal properties. Its benefits as a general ...”

“... if one thinks of it, must have lain in a kind of innocence, the insouciance of a born talker. He may have been all the bad things I have called him, but unaffectedly so and without calculation; if he was self-obsessed, he was unselfconsciously self-obsessed. The effect he made on the Osbourne family, when they first set eyes on him, is suggestive. It ...”

“... says memorably, reminding us that MacDiarmid was both a Stalinist and a plagiarist, ‘consistency may be the hobgoblin of small minds, but accountability is still the hallmark of complete ones.’ And too often MacDiarmid did not hold himself accountable. Accordingly the case for the prosecution – as it has been presented with some heat by earlier ...”

“... are alien, has left a vast interpenetration largely unexamined. Indeed, all the sins of omission may point to inadmissible ties. Not that Declan Kiberd, director of the Yeats Summer School, would admit them. Citing the ideas of Edward Said, he recently argued that ‘ “Irishness” is simply the experience of being endlessly defined and described, derided ...”

“... Office is stirred into action, as it finally was in the Guildford case following publication of Robert Kee’s Trial and Error, that other police officers are sent in to sort out and look over the trial papers. Although this can and sometimes does result in the discovery of malpractice, it is still like putting the fox in charge of the hen-coop. It relies ...”

“... Social Democrat parties as to the liking of the Tories. If it has any socio-political value (which may well be doubted), that value is just there – in saying what nobody, of any political party, wants to hear. It follows that worth in poetry cannot be determined by that favoured device of egalitarian politics, the committee: not even when the committee is ...”