“... back a long way, and perhaps the classic illustration is to be found in the 1870s with the case of Charles Marvin, who later established a considerable reputation as an author on the affairs of Europe and Central Asia. Contemporary critics praised his books about Russia and the East. Except by scholars, these works are long forgotten, but what is remembered is ...”

“... trying to convert the knots and twists of Russian and French sentences into intelligible and, I hope, fluent English; I’ve also translated books and articles. On the one hand, ‘You talk – I talk’; on the other, ‘You write – I write.’ The translator has time to change, edit and refine his text. He also has a desk, entire shelves full of ...”

“... fluid along to safeguard his investment, intending to display the twins dead or alive. ‘I hope these will prove profitable as a curiosity,’ he wrote to his wife, Susan, who eventually undertook much of the daily work of managing the twins. Onlookers flocked to view the Siamese Twins and paid a high price – fifty cents or the equivalent – for the ...”

“... the centre of family life an in-built disappointment, an emotional investment in what is missing. Charles and Isobel in Human Croquet collect things belonging to their absent mother – a shoe, a powder compact, a lock of hair – but fail to make a life for themselves in the present. In the short story ‘Temporal Anomaly’, Marianne, who has been dead for ...”

“... the source of Turner’s interest. Litter and debris are for him emblems of the fallacy of hope, intimations of mortality. Rubbish attracts him because it is the favour to which we must all come, the condition to which time will reduce even our most monumental achievements. As the sun sinks on Carthage, that proud city seems already to be dissolving ...”

“... The early years of the Revolution saw one or two competent plays, such as Chénier’s Charles IX, but they were written along traditional lines. Laya’s excellent Ami des Lois – equally conventional in style – was suppressed by the Commune after only four performances, on political grounds. The theatre of the Terror was represented by such ...”

“... After his suicide attempt, Lau turned to writing on financial matters, perhaps in the hope of persuading German princes to support freedom of religion on economic grounds. He continued to lament the failure of his radical writings, which he had published anonymously: ‘I have piped loudly and melodiously enough, but they did not want to ...”

“... children of the world, his eyes caged and hostile behind glass – still Péguy said that Hope is a little child. Violent contrariety of men and days; calm juddery bombardment of a silent film showing such things: its canvas slashed with rain and St Elmo’s fire. Victory of the machine! The brisk celluloid clatters through the gate; the cortège ...”

“... the loss of cultural memory are said to be the order of the day (an all too reductive idea), what hope is there for literary criticism which depends on remembrance and cultural knowledge? Steiner’s answer is deceptively simple: auctoritas. As a critic, Steiner believes ‘in the relations, as these were classically conceived, between words and ...”

“... was going on, or when the Tories wrapped the Albert Hall in a blue ribbon, it was hard not to hope that our disdainful visitor was spending the day somewhere else. But where? On every side, there seems to be some Toytown farce in progress. What, for instance, would Gore make of Christine Hamilton? What would he make of Martin Bell? Too British to be ...”

“... pained) observer of Kipling’s idées fixes. He thought Bateman’s, which dated from the time of Charles I, an ‘oddly discordant setting for its owner’s furious modernism and journalism’. But it was one of Kipling’s talents not to be abashed by discordance. In a letter written for publication in Filson Young’s The Complete Motorist (1904), Kipling ...”

“... left much to be desired. It was simply premature in the Seventies to hold any realistic hope of addressing the fundamental nature of cancers, since the necessary biological methods were only just then being developed. Nonetheless, the millions of dollars poured into the pipe-dream of finding the virus that causes human cancers were not wholly ...”

“... to where we began in Blackpool. For years now I have set out on this dismal pilgrimage filled with hope and health and holiday sun, only to return filled with alcohol, tobacco fumes and hot air. The conference season is an annual ritual, a ceremonial enactment of the entire political liturgy, including the beatification of leaders and the veneration of ...”

“... the androgens, oestrogens and progestins were increasingly used in cancer therapy, and in 1966 Charles Huggins won the Nobel Prize for research into the relationship between hormones and prostate cancer. But medical enthusiasm for hormone therapy faded in favour of other chemotherapeutic interventions. Hormone therapy came to be regarded as a ...”

“... must learn to type.’ Well, I don’t like capitalism any more than the next man, and I do hope that when he made them redundant, Barthes’s typists set to and wrote of liberty and desire themselves; but assuming they hadn’t been doing his typing for the sheer joy of helping the world receive the thoughts of Roland Barthes, they surely weren’t ...”