“... universe. Yet they were also very different men. Haber’s pragmatic conversion to Protestantism may have been unusual, but in other respects he was the model of an assimilated middle-class Jew. Like the subjects of two shorter essays here – the immunologist Paul Ehrlich (inventor of chemotherapy) and the physicist Max Planck – Haber embraced German ...”

“... images of ruin have come equally well from other origins (Great War, civil war, revolution) and may this not be more relevant, since the broken bridge and the cleft hill don’t belong at all to what was done to the crofting townships by the lairds’ thugs, nor do tiles, glass or china, none of which were in use there? But usually Marshall is relevant and ...”

“... recognised. At their peak in the 1650s his almanacs sold up to 30,000 copies a year. From them he may only have netted a modest £70 a year (enough for a gentleman to live on), but they served to advertise his astrological practice, from which we have the surviving records of many thousands of consultations. Lilly advised the rich, famous and powerful; among ...”

“... but realists and pragmatists . . . Illusions,’ she continues, ‘are built on nothing: hopes may have real foundations, however fragile or temporary. This was the case with the postwar decade.’ All the same, she endorses many of the criticisms levelled at the agreement, and particularly those directed against the British. Holding the balance between ...”

“... Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate, which are not quite prepared to admit to being long poems. But it may be too broad. Forster explicitly includes, alongside Emma and the rest of the Great Tradition, texts as unlike each other, and as unlike Emma, as Pilgrim’s Progress and W.H. Hudson’s Green Mansions. No one’s arguing about Emma. But Pilgrim’s Progress ...”

“... of India’ or ‘an Indo-Aryan language’. One of the more scholarly sites speculates that it may indeed be more than one language, because its significant dia-lect variations have not yet been thoroughly analysed. Ghosh’s separation of Bhojpuri from Hindustani has a polemical aspect, and sets it apart as a ‘minority’ language at one remove from the ...”

“... The difference between the Girard-Cadière case and the sexual abuse scandals of our own day, it may seem, is no more than a matter of media technology. Yet the trial itself turned on Cadière’s claims to have experienced miracles, visions and divine possession, and involved testimony obtained during an exorcism. Both Cadière and Girard were accused of ...”

“... line of communication’ (stärkster Verbindung) with the castle. The wrong destination may, after all, be the right one; and in another sense, too, since K. falls asleep and dreams that he is wrestling with a naked castle official who resembles a Greek god. It’s all to no avail. The next morning, Bürgel can’t wait to get rid of him, and he is ...”

“... they’re from British Rail, and I’m left reflecting that in a year or two one or other of them may well be writing me (like his counterparts in electricity and water before him) to offer me shares in Rail-North or BritTrak. I’ll reply in righteous fury, How can you find it in your conscience to sell off the commonweal? He’ll reply wearily and almost ...”

“... the intriguingly subversive suggestion that the formidable Catholic dévote, Madame de Maintenon, may have had a hand in composing L’Ecole des filles. Pornography knows no party-line, and is as much the preserve of aristocratic libertines as of zealous anti-court satirists. What are we to make of all those Restoration tributes to Charles II’s saucy ...”

“... sums it up nicely: the villagers, he says, were ‘vainly attempting to restore a lost world which may never have existed’. The economic aspects of that struggle we are better able to understand, in all their complexity, after reading this book. What we are still no better able to understand is the sort of thing that happened at Datchet, near Windsor, in ...”

“... to take their own cars with them. Readers eager for a feel of steamy, seamy Havana in the 1950s may feel English takes too long to get there, then skimps a little on the detail. But what he does offer provides plenty of scope for extrapolation. There was the legendary Tropicana, located in a jungle outside Havana, with its scantily clad dancers and lavish ...”

“... of the governing assumptions about intellectuals, but it doesn’t square with the facts. France may be a special case, especially France between the 1930s and the 1950s, but the British situation should be regarded as ‘one distinctive variant of a larger international pattern’. Germany, Russia, Italy and the United States, among others, share with ...”

“... his voice and said ‘Sir, you and I have sat here with a board between us now for 27 years. May I venture to ask your name?’ The reply from the other side of the board was: ‘Sir, you’re a very impertinent fellow.’ The ingredients are good enough, but the finished product puts one in mind of a tasty bread made without enough yeast. Langford’s ...”

“... wrote, ‘but starts rather from an inner fact of his individual consciousness.’ These two views may not be contradictory for most poets, but they are problematic in the case of MacDiarmid because he had been built from the outside in. In 1939, MacDiarmid wrote to an aspiring writer who had sent him some poems: so far from producing poetry you seem to me to ...”