“... and the shape of books were more than casually connected. As time went by, and electronics took over from mechanical systems for data storage and typesetting, the same was said of computers. George Landow’s Hypertext is about one way of using computers to manipulate texts. He makes high claims for hypertext, a richly interconnected kind of ...”

“... inconsistency unperceived by the speaker’. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Ricks quotes Sir John Mahaffy’s answer, when asked to distinguish the Irish bull from similar freaks of language: ‘The Irish bull is always pregnant.’ More often than the OED appreciates, the Irish bull knows he’s pregnant and is offering his audience an occasion to ...”

“... as accurately as possible the many dialects and regional accents he encountered) noted: ‘I took down what he had to say, just as he said it – without altering a word or adding one.’ He did this because he ‘wished to preserve the memory of the most artless, sociable and exhaustless talker I ever came across. He did not tell me a single remarkable ...”

“... dustily undisturbed among the essays of Shenstone and Stevenson, Birrell and Lynd. ‘It took me a while, I confess, to become interested in my pale “Uncle Octave”,’ Yourcenar reports. Nevertheless, she made a little study of this neglected essayist – and of his beloved brother, Rémo, a melancholy young radical who shot himself (to the music ...”

“... It was not coincidental that the first American revival of Julius Caesar which restored this scene took place in 1937, when books were being burned in Germany: Orson Welles portrayed the plebeians who murder Cinna as Fascist Brown-shirts. In 1937, in 1599, Julius Caesar dramatised an attack on a poet, at a time when poets were being attacked outside the ...”

“... intellectual in politics’ in the sense in which that description applies, for instance, to John Stuart Mill (or even perhaps to Arthur Balfour). Brougham’s intellect could serve him superbly in political life, especially perhaps in the mastery of complex subjects displayed in some of his astonishing speeches. Yet the great 1828 speech on law ...”

“... and balance-sheets, the Loyalist imagination petrified while the libertarian Protestant ethic took on strange and distorted forms. Back in the Sixties when Longley was writing ‘No Continuing City’ Ian Paisley was brooding in a prison cell on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans and attaching that text to an intuition of the essentially corrupt and temporary ...”

“... flock. What the landlord did not take in rent, or the gombeen man on interest payments, the priest took on tithes which were very often of his own invention. Most of all, though, the priest and the people conspired in an attitude of such repressive severity towards sexual matters that, for all its traditional generosity and sympathy in other respects, the ...”

“... is an oddity, on the face of it, that she should be so much admired by the cohort from which she took General Tilney, Sir Thomas Bertram, Mr Woodhouse and Sir Walter Elliot.) Is Barbara Pym, too, a novelist for older men? Certainly they have so far been more gallant and vociferous than women in championing her. Lord David Cecil, ...”

“... double-meaning, mocking, outrageously blend warm feeling and cold eye. The intellectual change took longest to come. ‘Cast a cold eye on life, on death’ were Yeats’s last words to us, carved by his command on his gravestone in Drumcliff churchyard. Time was when we had not the cold thinking to match the cold looking. The simplest illustration of the ...”

“... ways and read into it what they would like to find. One reason for this is that, as in the case of John Stuart Mill, a writer with whom one may notice many parallels, there is something of a conflict between heart and head, and between the intellectual positions which logic forces him to accept and the ones with which he feels most at home. Although union ...”

“... man sent man with one proud look towards the tree, and he was gone, the humble one, and there he took the poison and returned at dawn are an off-putting model. One readily sees why scrupulous users of English would want to shy from it, as James Greene also does in his translations from Afanasy Fet, which Henry Gifford introduces with a monitory subtext of ...”

“... renaissance, is also concerned with what might have been, and with a legend which has run from Sir John Holles to S.R. Gardiner. He shows Henry as heir to the aspirations of the Sidney circle, a patron of the arts, and a champion of the Protestant cause. Whether the English financial system would have permitted Henry as king to have championed the Protestant ...”

“... work suggests, someone whose losses to date were reimbursed by a philanthropist, or who took an amnesia-inducing drug that led him to think he was starting tabula rasa, would have a lower propensity to take risks. The subject’s assessment of the starting position influences whether she takes a prudent or a risk-seeking approach to a given schedule ...”

“... it in the process or cutting loose from it altogether. The result is stalemate. In an essay on John Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga written while he was completing the second version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence argued that ‘the thing a man has a vast grudge against is the man’s determinant’. Something similar seems to be true of ...”