“... has come to be called a ‘degenerate research programme’. In moral philosophy this abandonment took the form, by and large, of turning away not only from the logical positivists’ answers but from their questions too. Instead of proposing alternative accounts of what moral assertions were, the generation that started writing in the Sixties and Seventies ...”

“... Eventful Years in Paraguay and Edward East wick’s Venezuela; also – a fact first announced by John Halverson and Ian Watt – that the ‘life story of an American seaman’ which Conrad claimed to have found on a second-hand bookstall and to have helped him to find his plot, was On Many Seas by Frederick Benton Williams. This latter identification is ...”

“... other consists (or did in 1971) of playgoers for whom the theatre has never been the same since John Osborne, and if they don’t like a play they leave it in droves. Indeed, it sometimes seems that their chief pleasure in going to the theatre in Brighton is in leaving it, and leaving it as noisily as possible. In Beyond the Fringe the seats were going up ...”

“... recognised by Eliot to be among ‘the things ill done and done to others’ harm which once he took for exercise of virtue’. Like Ricks, I had interpreted that admonitory statement about things done to others’ harm in ‘Little Gidding’ as an act of contrition by a great, self-torturing poet. Now, reading Julius, I feel a deep sense of shame at my ...”

“... lost their lives. The UDT leaders fled over the border into Indonesian West Timor, while Fretilin took control of the colony, and began to move towards formal independence, with wide popular support according to many foreign observers. The only option now left to Indonesia was an invasion, duly launched on Pearl Harbor Day, 1975, within hours of the departure ...”

“... of the sort that his more literal-minded admirers expected to find. Demobbed in 1946, he took up his deferred place at Harvard where, with what he came to consider a ‘hysterical disregard for practicality’, he decided to major in French. For his English classes he wrote Firbankian short stories in a manner an unsympathetic tutor described as ...”

“... the Persians, or perhaps by a renegade Roman soldier. Others believed God had taken no chances. John Malalas, the author of a sixth-century chronicle of the world that began with the Creation, reported a dream in which a bishop transported to heaven witnessed an enthroned Christ instruct the martyr-saint Mercurius: ‘Go forth and kill the emperor ...”

“... Mare hero-worshipped Hardy, whom he first visited at Max Gate in June 1921. As was his wont, Hardy took him to the graves of Emma and his parents and sister in Stinsford churchyard, where de la Mare watched him scrape off the moss from their tombstones with a homemade implement contrived for that purpose. They shared an interest in ghosts and graveyards, in ...”

“... of Pastoral – and since I have never read its chapters in sequence, I chose the first method: took the book as a book and then went back to the essays and reviews. The result was not just intriguing but moving. It’s true that The Dyer’s Hand is not systematic criticism, or systematic anything, and Mendelson reminds us that Auden ‘never explained in ...”

“... enabling the curious reader to construct a poem which began, say, with line 1 from sonnet 7, took its line 2 from sonnet 3, its line 3 from sonnet 10, and so on. This novel procedure allowed Queneau’s 140 lines to generate, potentially, 100 million million (10 14) poems, which would take, he later calculated, someone reading 24 hours a day around ...”

“... but the sheer coincidence of a Jacobean dramatist and a legendary director sharing the name John Ford. So perhaps it takes a formalist to know one. But the contemporary formalist whose approach converges most sharply on Herbert’s is the sculptor Cornelia Parker. For a piece called Measuring Liberty with a Dollar (1998), for instance, Parker ...”

“... a whodunnit with a romantic agenda. Not far into her sequence of Adamsberg books Vargas took the risk, with her detective – magnetic despite the scruffiness – having an affair with Camille Forestier, not a waitress/actress but that rarer hybrid, a musician/plumber. In Seeking Whom He May Devour (1999, translated 2004) it was Camille, on her ...”

“... without this gap, there was no place for him. In this scenario, his wives, lovers and children took a secondary role. If anything they were important because they underlined the extent to which he lived outside convention, and, in Anita’s case, because she greatly enhanced his image as a romantic and charismatic figure. All of which brings us to the ...”

“... membership had been barely five hundred.) In November 1940, less than four years before it took power in Belgrade, the Yugoslav Communist Party had six thousand members; at its lowest point, in 1932, it had counted barely two hundred. How strong the Vietnam Communist Party was when it began to consider an insurrection for independence in 1941 is ...”

“... turboprop Gulfstream V executive jet with the registration number N379P painted on its tail. It took off at 2.40 a.m. for an unknown destination. As the Washington Post later reported, at 19.54 on 26 October, Anwar’s story was posted on the FreeRepublic.com website. A few minutes later a blogger reported the aircraft’s registered owner: Premier ...”