“... enterprises. The issue has certain historical echoes. In the spring of 1930, 16 years into his service in the Chinese Maritime Customs, my father, James Anderson, was posted to Hong Kong. He remained there two years, technically posted to Kowloon, but living on the Peak. He disliked the place. The setting might be ‘carelessly beautiful’, but the ...”

“... burns received during the Battle of Britain, Wolfenden developed eye trouble during National Service). They came from provincial middle-class homes, their mothers beloved and doting, their fathers withdrawn professional men. Each in some way willed or brought about his own death: Wood threw himself under a train while suffering from paranoid ...”

“... by this bench marked the completion of the final phase of its construction. Since 1568, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, who had been made lord of Kenilworth in 1563, had been pouring money into the castle so it would be fit to accommodate the queen. Elizabeth visited in 1566, 1568 and 1572, but he didn’t finish his alterations until the last and ...”

“... 21st-century version of Aristotle’s Poetics – and for that matter of Cicero’s On the Orator, Robert McKee’s Story, Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the entire works of Syd Field, and just about every other book ever written that pretends to reveal the ways fiction, drama or poetry ‘work’ – is tvtropes.org, the self-described ...”

“... duress, planters felt compelled to adopt new measures and assume new attitudes (giving lip service to frugality, for example) in order ‘to regain personal honour and independence’. Some hoped to become solvent by moving to fresh lands in the Piedmont. Others, like George Washington, switched from tobacco to wheat, thereby transforming themselves ...”

“... peers. ‘He is by all odds the most brilliant young physicist here, and everyone knows this,’ Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Los Alamos project, wrote to a colleague. Another eminent elder physicist, Eugene Wigner, described him as ‘a second Dirac, only this time human’. The rest of Feynman’s career was spent in academic physics, first at ...”

“... During my solitary evenings I have been reading the two volumes of Thomas Hardy’s biography by Robert Gittings. I have just finished it and this recalls to me Hardy’s funeral at Westminster Abbey, which I actually attended. Or rather the funeral of most of him: his heart had been left behind in Dorsetshire. I suppose I was one of the ...”

“... to experiment. It plays host to some unlikely double acts, with the ‘sentency stanzas’ of Robert Frost found alongside the ‘stanzaic sentences’ of Gertrude Stein, and it stretches from Whitman to Ashbery, both innovators in poetical-paragraphical style – ‘big blocks of words, prosy chunks that in the sequential and cumulative effects can be ...”

“... biography and paraphrase; de Botton generates almost four pages by rearranging sentences from Robert Baldick’s translation of A rebours. And when all else fails, the literary pose gives licence to cod-Proustian long-windedness, replete with ‘it is perhaps’, ‘that which’ and the bogus ‘precisely’. Here, for example, is how he expresses the ...”

“... heavily at lunchtime and fell asleep during afternoon meetings; he liked to play with guns; after Robert Kennedy ordered a halt to all operations against Cuba during the missile crisis Harvey sent in teams of agents; once in an office discussion he pulled a 45, pointed it at someone who disagreed with him, and released the safety catch. This nutcase held ...”

“... and bangs and hairy bits of engineering, a sensitivity to social class and bureaucratic and service amour propre, and an awareness of the rush and eddy of history, like the winds that made a Z of the cloud over Monte Bello. We all know now that detonating atomic bombs in the atmosphere is a bad thing, but Cathcart does not judge his heroes by political ...”

“... earlier than his, Clarence is undergoing a painful loss of faith, brought on by reading Robert Ingersoll’s Some Mistakes of Moses and other scornful and persuasive incitements to infidelity. His life is ruined, and Updike tells us, with characteristic thoroughness, why this was so and what it felt like. ‘Life’s sounds all rang with a curious ...”

“... with French and Italian connections. His father and grandfather were both flautists in the service of Henri II; they fled Paris in 1561 amid a wave of Protestant repression. In London, Nicholas Lanier the Elder married Lucretia Bassano, the daughter of the Italian musician Anthony Bassano. The family prospered and forty years later, Nicholas’s ...”

“... and rum to the British colony of Sierra Leone. A former slave trader, Benson now worked in the service of abolition, and his concern about the wet goods was not simply for his own fortune; he also worried for the cause of ‘legitimate commerce’, one of two key concepts at the heart of Bronwen Everill’s incisive history of political economy and ...”

“... Parini observes that ‘Like so many gifted writers – F. Scott Fitzgerald, W. H. Auden and Robert Frost among the most prominent of them – Steinbeck could not accommodate himself to the academic grid and grind.’ Were Parini to describe Steinbeck pissing, doubtless we should be told that Shakespeare and Milton were also in the habit of passing water ...”