“... idiot in the ways of the world’, an ‘anomalous character’, envious, blundering, clownish. James Prior’s full, scholarly biography, designed to restore Goldsmith’s dignity, did not appear until 1837 and was quickly supplanted by two popularising and very popular works, John Forster’s The Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith (1848) and ...”

“... had been like. I said I wanted to go up to the Fairy Ring. For I’d had the fairy stories of James Hogg the Ettrick Shepherd read to me and he’d written of this wood, where it was dangerous to go most of the time, and especially to the Fairy Ring. The toadstools, a pale, hideous necklace of poison round the thick, mossy neck of the Ring, had been ...”

“... By the mid-l780s Knight moved in the liberal, not to say liberated Whig circles that had Charles James Fox as a hero, and ancient Athens as an inspiration. Knight’s first literary attempt was to describe a tour of Sicily in 1777. He hired two artists to accompany him, and briefed them to make meticulous drawings of the archaeological sites. His commentary ...”

“... perhaps the most like Grendel’s arm after Beowulf tears it off and hangs it up in Hrothgar’s hall: huge, a bit of a mess, and, in its vastness, terrifying to contemplate. The earliest discussions call this kind of verse ‘melic’ (the Greek melos means ‘song’), and roughly distinguish sung poems from epic and tragedy. Aristotle, who had a strong ...”

“... red brick terraces of the Lisburn Road, where Ulster banners fly from the lampposts, to the City Hall with its eau-de-nil dome and pale stone statue of Queen Victoria. The clinic isn’t easy to find: the signs beside the door at No 14 are for BioKinetic Europe, which runs clinical trials, MKB Law, and Bupa; next door there’s a Tesco Express and Boojum, a ...”

“... College of Art on a scholarship. After working in the kitchen at the newly opened Royal Festival Hall in 1951 – he’d begun by mopping floors but was soon roped into skinning a heap of sole – he came up with the idea of drawing recipes as cartoon strips. At first these were for personal use only – he didn’t want to spoil his ‘expensive ...”

“... starts in the first book with Penelope coming down from her private quarters into the great hall, to find a bard performing to throngs of her suitors; he’s singing about the difficulties the Greek heroes are having in reaching home. She isn’t amused, and in front of everyone she asks him to choose another, happier number. At which point young ...”

“... Men. It was published near the end of 1599 (at some point after its registration at Stationers’ Hall on 17 November), so ‘lately’ probably means A Warning had been playing at the newly built Globe, which opened its doors that summer – a crowd pleaser in that all-important first season in Southwark, cheek by jowl with their chief competitors, the ...”

“... analysis. The famous descriptions in Notes of the natural stone bridge over a branch of the James River, and of the passage of the Potomac through the Blue Ridge Mountains, establish the picturesque by means of cunningly juxtaposed evocations of the sublime and the beautiful. (The first of these terms, perhaps because American topography was supposed ...”

“... who painted it, when, where or why. Two years ago, at the instigation of David Bindman, Catherine Hall, Esther Chadwick and myself, the V&A subjected the canvas to a lengthy, state-of-the-art scientific examination. Frustratingly, its published report could not answer any of these questions.And then, a few months ago, everything changed. On a hunch, I asked ...”

“... or not this bit of gossip is true, that ending would have fitted the epic sweep of the movie. But James Harvey found the happy ending a relief: ‘Sensible people don’t kill or maim each other for revenge or honour or empty matters of pride.’† And for Pippin the happy ending fits because the film was not really an epic to begin with: Dunson’s cattle ...”

“... into what had happened on that never-forgotten, never-forgiven day. Muzak crooned in the arrival hall, stalls offered stuffed leprechauns, Guinness T-shirts and ‘Kiss Me I’m Irish’ buttons. Passengers chatted over caffe latte and croissants. Could this be the Ulster I last laid eyes on thirty years ago? Where were the sandbags, the razor wire, the ...”

“... where’s your sense of humour? It’s only a joke.’7 May. On the TV news footage of Stuart Hall arriving for the first day of his trial at Preston Crown Court; he is seemingly handcuffed with his hands held in front of him, but thus shackled has to negotiate the quite steep steps from the police van. At 84, he manages this without much help, which is ...”

“... technology, complicated and unreliable even with ‘a remote control concealed in my watch (very James Bond)’; there are the clumsy mortifications of everyday life; and there is the spectre of oneself in coming years as a ‘damper on every party, a dud at every dinner table. A grandfather unable to communicate with his growing grandchildren, in the ...”

“... One refers to the public human being, as when you say: ‘I’ll meet you in front of Carnegie Hall at a quarter to eight.’ The other refers to the subject of consciousness, as when you think, ‘I hear an oboe,’ or ‘cogito ergo sum.’ The argument of the book proceeds from phenomenology – an introspective examination of the subjective character ...”