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“... ask for news of Mr Gladstone, thinking of him as like a story that never ran out. His father would read from the paper over their tea, over the scraping of cutlery, delivering the speeches word for word in his thick, swelling accent, pausing between sentences to scoop something off his plate, breathing loudly through his nostrils as he chewed, his eyes running ...”

“... Had things​ been different, last year’s obituaries might have read like this. Although known for his charm, wit and talent as mimic and raconteur, Jeremy Thorpe will be chiefly remembered as the deviser of much of the programme of modern British liberalism, and the architect of one of its great periods of electoral success ...”

“... literary executors, that many of these reflections would be of interest to people who would not read Wittgenstein’s philosophical work, even though the best understanding of most of them requires the background of that work. Fifteen years ago Von Wright began selecting this material, the first result being several hundred pages of remarks. This was felt ...”

“... supposed. The ‘ancestor of the modern scholarly apparatus of footnotes’ is said to be Peter Lombard in the first half of the 12th century, though Peter was citing authorities, which makes him different from scientific modern scholars, who cite sources. Scientific history is conventionally associated with Leopold ...”

“... of its namesake, seems consecrated to the unusual and the mortifying. The current show – Joel-Peter Witkin’s photographs of corpses, amputees and hermaphrodites – holds a grotesqueness sufficient to remind the visitor of how sweet, how antique already, the infamous Mapplethorpe images have become. At least his models were alive. Circumstance has ...”

“... Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda is a tall story, as elaborate and fantastical as any of the yarns spun by the trickster hero of his last novel Illywhacker. For one thing, it’s a family history, and we’re all of us secretly stunned by the coincidences which have resulted, against the odds, in our existence. And the narrator’s account of his great-grandfather, the Reverend Oscar Hopkins, is, by any standards, a weird one ...”

“... for a surrogate mother in every relationship,’ says Elizabeth Sweeting). His ‘marriage’ to Peter Pears, begun shortly after Mrs Britten’s death, may be partly understood in this light (Pears’s singing voice, it was noted, was uncannily similar to Mrs Britten’s), as may his lifelong willingness to be looked after, sometimes dominated, by a series ...”

“... lowered from the top of the tower block which stands in the middle of the Caltech campus. It read: ‘WE LOVE YOU DICK.’ The obituary of Feynman in the LA Times was awed and affectionate. It listed his achievements – his work in physics, the Nobel Prize it earned him and his work on the nuclear bomb. It also recalled his reputation as a womaniser, a ...”

“... Comforts of Madness is an extended imaginary exposure to what the wretches under his care feel. Peter is a long-term catatonic patient, and the novel takes the form of his interior monologue. Seemingly impervious to the outside world, Peter watches everything around him keenly. It is his choice to switch off – like ...”

“... conveniently isolated. The title of Fraser’s book, a common 17th-century phrase, derives from I Peter 3. 7, where the husband is urged to give ‘honour unto the wife, as unto the weaker vessel, and as being heirs together of the grace of life’. When Peter urged wives to ‘be in subjection to your own husbands’, it ...”

“... first image is of summer camp during the 1950s where, next to jolly healthy girls who don’t even read trash, Auerbach is a lone intellectual devouring Hungry Hill by flashlight. Published in 1943, it’s a saga of feudal decay that opens her American eyes to the possibility of another way of ordering the world. ‘I had always assumed that every generation ...”

“... heavy in portents, swirling curtains, flickering candles, bumps in the dark, and the ghost of Peter Quint in particular looks as if he has come from a bad night at a rock concert. Still, Psycho was only a year old, and it must have been reasonable to think the audiences even for a classy film needed plenty of signals (shrieking music, for example) to show ...”

“... on three fifth-century cremation urns from Spong Hill in Norfolk. The inscriptions simply read alu, which probably means ‘ale’. Perhaps the early speakers of Old English longed for ale in death as well as life. But, as the British Library’s exhibition Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms (until 19 February) displays, the inhabitants of early medieval Britain ...”

“... pleasure today just as it did to those fuddled dons and sleepy schoolboys who first heard James read them by the light of a single candle in the provost’s lodgings at King’s College, Cambridge, or in his last years, as provost of Eton. It may seem heartless or unsporting to deconstruct these little tales, for the author made no very exalted claim for ...”

“... business to prescribe what other people should have and what they should spend, what they should read and what they should watch. Latterday members of this élite may have been true to their Victorian forebears in exacting duty from themselves and deference from others, but both of these attitudes now stuck in the gullet of Essex Man. The policies of the ...”