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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... distinction remains.’ Only the inspired response of Aristotle to Euripides, Samuel Johnson to Shakespeare or Sainte-Beuve to Racine belong in Steiner’s republic. Does this mean that he sees Real Presences itself as a critical classic? Or is it yet another all-powerful act of impotence? The book certainly does not read like self-effacement, and when ...”

“... feminism has proved of interest to the second wave, and much of her work has been republished. William Maxwell, a friend and correspondent who was for years her editor at the New Yorker, published a selection of her letters in 1982, and Claire Harman, having edited the Collected Poems in 1983, published a good biography in 1989. Wendy Mulford’s lively ...”

“... his salary in 1986 was $550 million, which, on the Buchan-approved capitalisation model of Sir William Petty (20 times one’s annual income), made his personal worth about $11,000 million. Just as we are deciding that this is an achievement to wonder at, Buchan adds with some severity that ‘fortunes made in finance ... require little intelligence and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... supple, remarkably powerful readings to offer of Le Guin, Brian Aldiss, Philip K. Dick (‘the Shakespeare of science fiction’), A.E. Van Vogt, Kim Stanley Robinson and a range of others. Jameson has always been an energetic retriever of the neglected and maligned, and a brilliant salvage job here on Charles Fourier reflects this tendency. So, less ...”

“... England is part ghost story, part mystery, and as alarmingly funny as it is disturbing. Shakespeare makes an appearance – he passes in the spirit world as ‘Wagstaffe’, something of a louche lad about town – and is caught on tape having a squabble with another spirit: Wagstaffe: This sceptred isle . . . Morris: My sceptred ...”

“... journeys and drowsy hammocks’, and Youth (which contained Heart of Darkness), reviewed by William Beach Thomas, who had robustly little time for Conrad’s dense pessimism. Two years later, on Chekhov’s death, Francis Gribble magniloquently wavered on the fine point of the Russian’s stature: ‘he may or may not have been a man of genius.’ Too ...”