“... quite unlike any previous art. Other St Martin’s sculptors included Phillip King, Tim Scott and William Tucker, all innovative artists who became tutors at St Martin’s immediately after completing their own studies. Thenceforward there was a line of sculptors at St Martins who changed, even further, the concept of what sculpture might be. Among such ...”

“... in the later 18th century among women – the talking, and the meeting, the writing of essays on Shakespeare, the translating of the classics’. Scott-Baumann suggests that such work was underway much earlier. Her chosen poets were already engaged, she argues, in critical debates about literary style. Early modern women ‘theorised literature as much as ...”

“... Right, 1994 seemed relatively unembattled. The MLA released a survey showing that Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth were still the most frequently taught authors in literature survey courses. The convention coverage on CNN and National Public Radio was serious, and the Republican pundits had bigger fish to fry – word was out that they will ...”

“... circulated, or any of nature’s other more minor confidences uncovered by the likes of Darwin or William Harvey. To learn the secret of life is to figure out that DNA has a double-helical structure. And while Perutz did not make that discovery, he did run the Cambridge research unit in which the most notorious episodes of the double-helix story took place ...”

“... didn’t deter Teruzzi from making an impulsive visit to Varese, where Lilliana was rehearsing for William Tell, and proposing to her. She rebuffed him: ‘Please, I think of you as a friend.’ He left, furious.It would be nice to imagine that this cultured American had woken up to the unpleasantness of her suitor’s politics, but that wasn’t, alas, the ...”

“... had discovered the delights of collecting. Many Bardolaters, for whom Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare had served as a gateway drug, assembled folios of Shakespeare as well as the works of other English playwrights and poets – not to mention busts, pieces of period furniture, prop skulls that had been used in ...”

“... earned himself his role as King of the Dunces by finding fault with Pope’s 1725 edition of Shakespeare in his Shakespeare Restored: or, A Specimen of the Many Errors, as well Committed, as Unamended, by Mr Pope in his late Edition of this Poet (1726), a title which we may think asked for trouble. In 1729 the poem ...”

“... get more for himself. He knew and admired Hastings, and was a friend of the great orientalist Sir William Jones, scholar of Persian and Sanskrit, and, as Mr Jones, a member of the Club, present at Boswell’s election. When Johnson first wrote to Hastings on 30 March 1774, recommending to him the future Sir Robert Chambers, one of his Majesty’s Judges in ...”

“... not by simply dropping them in but by deploying them with acoustic finesse, is a signal gift. William Dunbar’s ‘Lament for the Makars’ is the greatest poem of naming that emanates from the Anglophone family of languages – and readers of this volume of letters will note Eliot’s enthusiasm for Dunbar – but Eliot’s fine sense of naming in ...”

“... experienced climate change but that they may, in part, have caused it. The palaeoclimatologist William Ruddiman has suggested that people started assaulting the ozone layer with greenhouse gases about eight thousand years ago, when farming began to replace hunting and gathering. Deforestation carried out by a growing population may have made the world ...”

“... and motives of his fellow-lodger’. These words were penned by Robert Latham’s collaborator, William Matthews, who died in 1976. He was a scholar in the old style, not given to trendy assimilation of historic sources into the narratology of modern angst. But his effort to see the diary as something more than ‘full, objective reporting’, a bigger ...”

“... His discussion of it, in the chapter on ‘Justice’, is the centrepiece of his book. ‘William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll,’ the song begins, ‘with a cane that he twirled round his diamond ring finger.’ ‘William Zanzinger had 24 years/Owns a tobacco farm of six hundred acres’; Hattie Carroll ...”

“... from the dacha. She also treats us to a short disquisition on Pasternak as a translator of Shakespeare – how he edited, used Russian idioms, took liberties, curbed Shakespeare’s verbosities, toned down the lewdness of the original. The Russians are rather prudish, as Andrei will later confirm when he describes ...”

“... Cape of Good Hope’. Herschel – former president of the Royal Astronomical Society and son of William Herschel, the discoverer of Uranus – had sailed from Britain to South Africa two years before with a giant reflecting telescope, on a mission to map the southern skies and observe the return of Halley’s Comet. Now, the Sun reported, he had trained his ...”

“... first published in 1954) but on its ability to tell complex stories – its contributors included William Faulkner, John Updike, Jack Kerouac and Don DeLillo. In Blood in the Garden, Herring is firmly in narrative mode, and he wants to remind us what a good narrative sport basketball is.This is true for several reasons, some more interesting than ...”