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“... President? (That is, if it did elect him: we still don’t know what happened in Florida, and we may never really know.) Back then, even if you despised Reagan for his politics, you had to acknowledge his charisma, or at least that others felt its sway. It’s the same with Clinton today: even if you loathe him for his duplicity, you have to admit his ...”

“... of the long flight. But they don’t always invite you to ponder the missing minutes or years, as Richard Linklater’s films do. There is a brilliant elision of this kind in the new film Boyhood – well, there are maybe eight of them, but one is especially eloquent about the gap it leaps over. Patricia Arquette, as the affectionate hard-up single mother of ...”

“... Who now, other than historians of modern France, remembers Richard Cobb? Cobb’s Wikipedia entry – the canonical index of posterity’s interest – measures three lines; by contrast, Hugh Trevor-Roper, his principal addressee in this collection, gets five thousand words. Yet Cobb, who died in 1996, was not only a historian of acknowledged genius ...”

“... is problematical. This book packs some of the nastiest shocks since Richard Walker in The Savile Row Story (1988) disinterred a Lloyd’s Weekly News headline on a sweatshop exposure of 1892: ‘The Duke of York’s Trowsers Made in a Fever Room.’ Chenoune is a French fashion journalist whose book was supported by the ...”

“... back, ‘Greetings from the famous son of a famous father,’ to which Dedalus responds: ‘Who may he be?’ Stephen, 46/41, walking along Sandy-mount Strand: Unwholesome sandflats waited to suck his treading soles, breathing upward sewage breath. Gabler changes the stop to a comma, and adds: ‘a pocket of seaweed smouldered in sea-fire under a midden ...”

“... Richard Hamilton’s ‘Protest Pictures’ have turned the galleries of Inverleith House in Edinburgh into a time-machine.* News events from the last fifty years flash up in every room, from a drug bust and a student murder in the 1960s, through the Troubles in the 1970s and 1980s, to the Gulf debacles of the last two decades ...”

“... he joined the abortive crusade of Humbert, Dauphin of Vienne; it has been suggested that it may have been on this expedition, somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean, that he acquired the famous shroud. He had by this time already made a martial name for himself, and in 1346, after the French defeat at Crécy (a battle he was lucky to miss), he was taken ...”

“... it would appear, although, as Martin indicates, the relations between FitzGerald and his poem may be more complex than that. He did not think of himself as a poet, though he discovered a unique way of writing a poem, a way that could never be repeated. Nor could it be improved on. FitzGerald’s endless tinkerings with his stanzas reveal that dolorous ...”

“... Collectors’ fantasy Christmas present it may have become, but Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies was a series of headaches before it was anything else. Despite the confidently comprehensive title they gave it, the editors of the First Folio, John Heminges and Henry Condell, were defeated by the task of assembling all of their late colleague’s plays: we will never know how many nights’ sleep they lost over their failure to secure a copy of Love’s Labour’s Won, written before 1598 and printed in quarto before 1603, nor what arguments led to the exclusion not just of all Shakespeare’s poems and the single scene he wrote for Sir Thomas More but of three late collaborative plays, Pericles, The Two Noble Kinsmen and Cardenio ...”

“... carves the rail, Whose yet unfeathered quills her fail. You can’t make an omelette, Marvell may be hinting, without breaking eggs, though on the other hand – and there’s usually another sleight of hand with him – he may be ironising the English revolutionaries when he shows how the mower The edge all bloody ...”

“... whose biography in a sense we are writing, and to whom we thus come as close as we can. The idea may sound fanciful, but it is pursued with remarkable force and fascination in Richard Holmes’s study. Richard Savage, the young Johnson’s alter ego, was a poor and talented writer whom ...”

“... For those of us who never quite mastered the old physics, the idea of tackling a new version may not be terribly tempting. But Ed Fredkin, the controversial scientist whose brain-child it is, insists that digital physics is simpler than the ordinary kind. In fact, its simplicity, its elegance is one of the main reasons why Fredkin believes in it. And ...”

“... Permit Me Voyage, its title drawn from a line by Hart Crane with a tougher edge than the borrowing may indicate; an accomplished book, marred by an over-abundant proffered delicacy of sentiment – ‘the Chamber of Maiden-Thought’ shining sweetly but with too constant a glow. Agee soon found a regular job writing for Fortune, where in the mid-1930s he ...”

“... and reported to King Leopold that Albert lacked nothing in charm and attractiveness – ‘it may also be considered a fortunate circumstance that he has already a certain English look about him’ – but that he seemed deficient in strength of will and intellectual and moral force. ‘To pursue so difficult a political career a whole life through ...”

“... do not line up neatly in support of one another, women must choose, and their struggles to do so may serve as a catalyst for self-definition, resistance and writing.’ Queen Anne is the most prominent example of a woman whose mixed loyalties resulted in ‘self-definition’. Her husband was reluctant to acknowledge her autonomous royal status as the ...”