“... can be visited by appointment: I recall spending an afternoon a few years ago in the mote-filled hall of the University of Montpellier’s junk room, examining one of the famous series of wax impressions of syphilitic buboes and chancres from the 19th century. Montpellier’s anatomy tradition goes back to 1315, when the body would be opened for inspection ...”

“... ideas while obscuring his overt possession of them. That he chooses to read a fiction in a lecture hall rather than a lecture enables him to pose the unspeakable instead of talking about the impossibility of speaking it. Last year he and I took part in a conference in Holland on the problem of evil. The participants fumbled around with the primary grotesquerie ...”

“... which no longer came to Scott. Many are in Yorkshire, where churches like the ‘bare-style’ St Peter, Barnsley marry strength with grace as masterfully as anything by Scott. An obituarist of Temple Moore claimed that he ‘summed up and completed the theory of the Gothic Revival’. That was to forget Sir Giles, who started to learn architecture from Moore ...”

“... what a mournful middle-class qualifier! – that ‘the show was a success: the suburban hall was almost three-quarters full.’ Pandit Rasraj, an eminent singer approaching the end of the ‘relatively brief period’ when a classical musician’s ‘creative powers and his visibility coincide’, is described as entering the ‘second phase, of ...”

“... late 19th century. In the years following the McNaughton case Britain entered ‘an age when music-hall hypnotists and salon mesmerists brought before the public a frightening display of individuals pursuing physical ends not of their own choosing. In the courtroom these cultural anomalies were supplied by sleepwalkers, automatons and a new variation on an old ...”

“... players, while thinking of Oxford. She does so, Wade points out, from a room which her suitor, Peter Wimsey, never enters: this is the domain of an independent woman. The plot shows a variety of women being thwarted by family or communal life: wife, don, novelist, servant. The names are a tease. Although a lord, Wimsey is intellectually astringent; Vane ...”

“... in Dallas ran a conference in November. Nor is More much celebrated outside academia and St Peter’s. The fate of the Romanov obelisk in Moscow’s Alexander Garden, first put up in 1914 to mark the tercentenary of the dynasty, is illustrative. Bolsheviks re-engraved the obelisk with More’s name and other mooted harbingers of communism. In 2013, 99 ...”

“... pioneering work of Samuel Johnson, and rival the efforts of 19th-century European lexicographers. Peter Gilliver, in The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (2016), characterises the movement that led to the formalisation of the Philological Society’s proposals as ‘a groundswell of what might be called lexicographic nationalism’, and the OED has ...”

“... of France’s fortifications along its eastern border with Germany. Donald and his brother, Peter, are not yet proficient enough in English to understand the text, so Joe translates it into German:The essential points of the French system, which was carried out on a gigantic scale, are as follows: a line of fortified casemates giving each other mutual ...”

“... axis of experience, if only one of several made available by verse. To set Sleeping rough beside Peter Robinson’s latest recension, This Other Life, is to recover a sense of the depths which belong to places which exist then as well as there. Robinson’s fidelity to life’s temporal infrastructure, its recessive inward distancings, is apparent in the ...”

“... affected Carstairs more than any other private loss.Elsewhere Summerscale compares Carstairs to Peter Pan, finding in her yearning for a secret hideaway and her dream of perpetual boyishness – she exercised fiercely all her life to ‘ward off womanliness’ – an affinity with Barrie’s perpetual boy:As Wadley was an image of her soul, Whale Cay was ...”

“... of going on.Murdoch became world famous as a novelist, and is the subject of a fine biography by Peter Conradi, but the lives of the others are not so well known. Anscombe, Murdoch and Midgley all came from middle-class families in suburban London. Their abilities were evident early, and they were encouraged to go to university. Not so Foot. Philippa ...”

“... actually alone. He was accompanied, as always, by his old nanny, Jessie Lightfoot. His lover Eric Hall, who was funding him, visited from time to time, and Bacon sometimes went to London, where his studio still was. The idea that two years in isolation or the sense of hitting bottom can be used to explain a shift in an artist’s work is one way of filling a ...”

“... pretty quickly – as Suite at the Majestic. That same translation became The Strange Case of Peter the Lett, then The Case of Peter the Lett. In 1963 it was newly translated as Maigret and the Enigmatic Lett. David Bellos’s recent translation is the first with the confidence to call the book in English what it is ...”

“... post-feminist or anti-feminist film, or just in some baffling way French. In the Guardian, Peter Bradshaw went for ‘provocative’, before deciding it was a ‘startlingly strange rape-revenge black comedy’. I didn’t think it was as strange as all that and I did think it was funny, but what really struck me was that every woman I knew who had ...”