“... in print, Eliot signed him up with Faber and organised a group of backers to provide him with a small regular income. Barker had just married his sister’s friend Jessica Woodward and gone to live in a cottage in Dorset, but it isn’t clear if Eliot knew why. The reason given was that his new bride was consumptive; the truth was she was pregnant and they ...”

“... the almost invariably vast impact of the outside world on the Jews, who are almost invariably a small minority of the population. My concern is with the impact of the Jews on the rest of humanity. And, in particular, with the explosive transformation of this impact in the 19th and 20th centuries: that is to say, since the emancipation and self-emancipation ...”

“... congruent, whether you draw them from Clark Clifford’s memoirs, Seymour Hersh’s critique, Stephen Ambrose’s judicious biography of Nixon or the recollections of Averell Harriman, Richard Holbrooke or Daniel Davidson. Mr Isaacson has added some extra but exiguous detail to the story. By shopping on both sides of the street, and betraying the side he ...”

“... Interpretation of Literature’. This belittling tag, coined in a 1988 essay of the same name by Stephen Parrish, general editor of the monumental Cornell Wordsworth, reflected two more widespread beliefs in literary theory: that ‘language is prior to thought’ and that authorial intention is ‘not only elusive and illusory, but irrelevant’. In the ...”

“... Juliet Barker finds the idea ‘ludicrous’, but says no more. Wordsworth éminence grise Stephen Gill thought that a verdict on Johnston’s claims would only be possible after ‘years’ of ‘rigorous scholarly assessment’. It was about a year and a half before the speculation was scotched. Michael Durey, writing in the TLS, proved that ‘Mr ...”

“... oval, straight, its parts moderately defined, forehead smooth, nose narrow, slightly hooked, mouth small’. Like many of his scientific contemporaries (there were a dozen competing taxonomies in Blumenbach’s day, classifying humans into between two and seven types), he was also setting up a hierarchy. ‘The white colour holds the first place,’ he ...”

“... find it.” That is the most important truth that has ever been uttered,’ he said in his Leslie Stephen Lecture of 1933, published as The Name and Nature of Poetry. His poetry is always fascinated by what is irresolvable – ‘Keep we must, if keep we can/These foreign laws of God and man’ – and his scholarly prose concerned, above all, with such ...”

“... by a new Employment and Support Allowance (ESA), with claimants divided into three groups: a small number ‘with the most severe health conditions or disabilities’ would receive the highest level of payment and wouldn’t be expected to look for work; those whose conditions were less severe would have to do ‘work-related activity’, practice ...”

“... markets by making a few phone calls and by holding informal meetings, at short notice, with small groups of heads of financial institutions. The unresolved question is whether the new, more formal regulatory systems are likely to have influence over established City institutions and over the ‘new money’ now so significant in the City. Clarke’s ...”

“... friendly with Swift, whom it was in their interest to cultivate. She and her husband were rather small people, physically, socially and economically, but they were brave enough to have Swift as a visitor: The Dean came to dine with us in our Lilliputian Palace, as he called it, and who could have thought it? he just looked into the Parlour, and ran up into ...”

“... who grow hundreds of acres of wheat, ride to hounds and potter in their walled garden. History, Stephen Dedalus groaned, is a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake – but these friends of ours are for the most part happily slumberous. For a couple of years I managed to put the child off on the grounds that he was too little, but this August I had to ...”

“... the excitement: ‘A wild, bustling time we had of it. I played my part as a conspirator in a small way, and made friends with two or three gallant men.’ Mission accomplished, they returned to Bordeaux, embarked for Dublin on the packet Leeds, and enjoyed fine nights on deck with ‘certain agreeable samples of womankind’, singing songs and reading ...”

“... English parcels varied, so merchants sprang up in the barrack-rooms to trade in commodities for a small cigarette percentage. Anyone wanting to exchange a meat loaf for a tin of Spam went to a merchant, and you went to them if you wanted to buy a Yorkshire pudding, for instance. Each merchant had a list of current prices attached to the barrack-room door ...”

“... such a transparent near-hoax, but that, they should have bothered with international law at all. Stephen Greenblatt, in Marvellous Possessions, makes a similar suggestion about Columbus’s remark that he was not contradicted – ‘y no me fué contradicho’ – when he took possession of a series of Caribbean islands in the name of the Spanish king. How ...”

“... and a brilliantly inventive and headlong sequence, propelled by Michel Legrand’s sparkling small-combo jazz score, that takes the action to Paris, where, coincidentally, fashion magnates and tastemakers from around the world have convened for the generic prêt-à-porter collections. Sergei meets a fashion magnate at the airport and shares a cab with ...”