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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... That is why her characters stay in fancy hotels, despite the dismal fates that accompany room service. In hotels, the Didion heroine, like Alice, falls down the rabbit hole into numb lawlessness, an ‘outland’ condition (recall Tom Outland in Willa Cather’s A Professor’s House). In literature, it is more delightful to lose a self than to gain ...”

“... in which he recounted a Tunbridge Wells childhood, a youthful infatuation with France, war-time service in the Army and an early career teaching English in postwar France as a way of financing time spent in the Archives Nationales and countless provincial depositories. The episodes recounted in The End of the Line further illuminate a trajectory already ...”

“... the most haunting stories in the book is that of the Tierra del Fuegian boy kidnapped by Captain Robert Fitzroy, Chief Officer of HMS Beagle, in 1830. The boy was given a name by the crew – Jemmy Button – and taken to London, where he ‘saw a stone lion on the steps of Northumberland House, and settled down to a boarding-school at Walthamstow’. On the ...”

“... first of a series of compromises with the arrival in 1957 of Network Three, a hobbies-and-study service that was given 40 per cent of the Third’s hours and sought to widen the audience by courting every minority from jazz-fanciers to motoring nuts. It was instantly nicknamed ‘the fretwork network’, a sobriquet more gruesomely applicable to today’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 ...”

“... rumours of the plague. It then moves to a review of previous English dictionaries, beginning with Robert Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall of 1604, which explains ‘hard vsuall English wordes’ borrowed from Latin and other languages, some now obsolete, others, such as sacerdotal, now well established despite Winchester’s comment to the contrary; and why ...”

“... It looked more like a postcolonial bureaucracy than anything else; there were three tiers of lunch service at its Moorgate headquarters, and executives would greet the afternoon with sherry and martinis. Authority flowed according to a ‘matrix structure’, where each operating unit answered to two layers of supervisors: the executives responsible for their ...”

“... especially the one on the Rigi. Whereas the English had at first tended to monopolise hostelry service, demanding full-scale banquets late at night, tyrannising hosts and abusing servants, all the nations of Europe now competed. At least the imperious English had forced hoteliers to brush up on hygiene and instal water closets. Serious climbers, who ...”

“... 17th-century euphemism for a post at the Court flesh market. Even among the beauties recruited to service the Royal Family, government officials and the aristocracy, Sarah and her elder sister Frances were notable. In 1673, when she was 13, she joined the household of Mary of Modena, the 15-year-old second wife of the Duke of York (the future James II). She ...”