“... The male armadillo also, as Buffon coyly puts it, ‘shows external signs of great progenitive powers’, that is, it has a penis two-thirds the length of its body. After observing, with some inaccuracy, that the armadillo’s shell was like that of a turtle or a crawfish, Buffon asserted that a good description, without definitions ... a particular ...”

“... room of a newspaper office on Dupont Street: it was twelve feet long, with five thousand keys. As Thomas Mullaney explained in his exhaustively researched The Chinese Typewriter (2017), the first real progress came in the 1910s when two engineering students in the US – Zhou Houkun at MIT and Qi Xuan at NYU – refused to accept that the problem lay in hanzi ...”

“... enjoyed Indian careers of their own, and his eldest daughter, Charlotte, married the son of Sir Thomas Metcalfe, the British resident at Delhi. Mount has always been intrigued by cliques, elites and who knows who. The Shakespears were connected to the Thackerays (Augusta was the novelist’s cousin), and with the Metcalfes also thrown in, Mount is able to ...”

“... of its heat . . . it will provoke a burning fever’. He believed that the dramatic curative powers of the cinchona were discovered by Indians from malarial coastal regions of Ecuador, and that the Spanish learned the secret only when a local chief took pity on a passing Jesuit ill with fever, and cured him with bark fetched from a nearby mountain. When ...”

“... is confounding by design, as it was with his fellow countryman, contemporary and sometimes rival, Thomas Bernhard, and as it was with one of his finest critics, W.G. Sebald. In Essay on the Jukebox, the second volume in the series Handke has recently finished, he, or a narrator quite like him, tells of how, in writing, he moved a cypress he’d seen in ...”

“... of English border castles and towers. In Northumberland, James awaited the English army, led by Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey. Though apparently possessing advantages in ground, equipment and supplies, James allowed himself to be outmanoeuvred by Surrey, who cut off the Scottish army’s route north, forcing it to move to Branxton Hill, where its cannon ...”

“... summer, began by placing him in the capacious context of such postwar avant-garde novelists as Thomas Bernhard, José Saramago and David Foster Wallace, only to acknowledge that, despite a shared affinity for ‘very long, breathing, unstopped sentences’, Krasznahorkai was ‘perhaps the strangest’ of them. The writer is ‘peculiar’; his work is ...”

“... that refer to these claims. Among the novels about which she has most to say is Death in Venice. Thomas Mann was 35 when he met the original of the boy Tadzio, whose beauty prevents Aschenbach from achieving ‘Platonic sublimation’. Consequently, Mann, with his aesthetic imperative, cannot offer ‘a primarily moral account of what it means to live into ...”

“... her book, where the metaphysics of New Historicism stick out awkwardly. She invokes these occult powers apropos of the most sensational case in that career, Forman’s connection with the amorous projects of the Jacobean society beauty Frances Howard, who wanted to divorce her husband and marry James I’s favourite Robert Carr, and apparently procured the ...”

“... scarcely a glimmer of reservation. In a passage which Gillian Spraggs has done well to disinter, Thomas de Quincey, in the grip of a severe bout of nostalgia, described highwaymen as members of ‘a liberal profession, which required more accomplishments than either the Bar or the pulpit; from the beginning it presumed a most bountiful endowment of heroic ...”

“... the Bush team wouldn’t rush to give reconstruction contracts to France, Germany and Russia,’ Thomas Friedman grumbled in the New York Times, ‘but why shove that in their faces while we’re asking them to forgive Iraq’s debts?’ Or was the Wolfowitz directive a bargaining chip placed on the table as part of Baker’s negotiating strategy? Are the ...”

“... ranks, conflict quickly emerged. In a world of kings, aristocrats and rigid social hierarchies, Thomas Jefferson’s words in the Declaration of Independence, ‘all men are created equal,’ became a rallying cry of the dispossessed. Abigail Adams’s plea to her husband, John, to ‘remember the ladies,’ her observation that women, no less than ...”

“... appears not to have troubled him at all). Mansfield accepted the submission of Gordon’s lawyer, Thomas Erskine, that guilt demanded treasonous intent, but it’s doubtful whether a jury of London property-owners would have worried about such questions. They were not going to convict an Englishman who had set out to defend Protestantism.A number of statutes ...”

“... than, in most cases, power) which they grew to exercise. Already, in the early 1830s, Thomas Barnes, editor of the Times, was privy to official secrets and consulted about ministerial appointments. His successor, Delane, claimed that the paper resembled the Church of the Middle Ages: ‘executor of the public will, informer of the public ...”

“... flawed persona. ‘The Many Faces of R. Crumb’, a two-page spread produced at the height of his powers in 1972, begins with a ridiculous image of the artist masturbating to one of his own comics and ejaculating out of his studio window, then goes on to depict him as a penitent saint, a fascist creep, a self-centred SOB, a sentimental slob, a rugged ...”