“... may just have said; often they are comprehensible only to himself. The passage has usually been read as a transcription of domestic and marital futility, but it is far more than that. Of quite extraordinary interest is the fact that in the manuscript copy the word ‘wonderful’ appears three times in Vivienne’s handwriting along the margin of the entire ...”

“... had housed John Verney’s cricket bats at the time of the English Civil War.Alexander Russell had read many of these earlier accounts of the city – Ross Burns, in his excellent summary of Aleppo’s long history, counts 17 separate accounts produced in the late 17th century alone – and he didn’t think the previous descriptions were outdated; he uses the ...”

“... is a good example of the theory put into practice. But what he added in a footnote was scarier: ‘Richard Ellmann’s bitter, professional Joyce and the weary, enigmatical Wilde are portraits of the biographer as he worked on those big and beautiful books. The real biographies of Joyce and Wilde are the histories of the works they themselves set down. All ...”

“... in Scarlet he knows that somebody has been smoking a Trichinopoly cigar, but since we have not read his monograph there is no possibility of our making the same identification and reasoning from it. Frequently Holmes has to explain to Watson the significance of matters which Watson, like ourselves, is not specialist enough to know anything about. Thus, in ...”

“... are producing text roughly as long as 18 copies of The Origin of Species a day. By the time you read this, the project will be nearly done, though it may take another year to align the bits of sequence and fill in the gaps. As the most visible (and expensive) product of Big Biology, the human genome project has understandably attracted much public ...”

“... that now at least (the nostalgic 1950s may be another matter) the book is more bought than read, more recommended than enjoyed. It is hard to imagine that, for all its promised glimpse of mythical Cambridge, many modern readers persevere for more than a few pages before being overwhelmed by its complex cast of late Victorian characters, who – like ...”

“... William Sancroft, who acceded to her request for charity and put her in touch with the publisher Richard Wilkin, who printed almost all of her works; and the one-time Oxford philosopher and theologian John Norris, who encouraged her thinking and who in 1695 published their Letters Concerning the Love of God, thus saving Astell’s letters to him from the ...”

“... Guevara was arrested by the Mexican police and interrogated. According to Anderson, who has read the interrogation notes kept by the police, he ‘openly admitted his Communism and declared his belief in the need for armed revolutionary struggle, not only in Cuba, but throughout Latin America’. Fidel, always keen to emphasise his nationalist and ...”

“... ascribed jokes and smart sayings to well-known figures such as the poet John Skelton or the fool Richard Tarleton. Jest-book-style anecdotes were often transcribed alongside more serious quotations in manuscript notebooks compiled by individual readers. So in 1601, the lawyer John Manningham recorded in what’s usually called his ‘diary’ (though really ...”

“... on Principia Mathematica. Professor Lowe was indebted to Russell, not only for the opportunity to read these letters, but also for Russell’s personal recollections of Whitehead, communicated in an interview when Russell was aged 93, for the information contained in the first two volumes of Russell’s Autobiography and most of all for the charming memoir of ...”

“... of sens interdit signs (as exotic as red phoneboxes), took seminars on the Communist Party, and read Sartre but not Beauvoir, who wasn’t thought suitable. They were strict about only talking French to each other, believing that if they were caught chatting in English they would be sent home, but lax about other things. The comtesse didn’t enforce the ...”

“... it was tightly plotted, suspense-driven, lavishly sexist and racist. In fact, though it is often read as a children’s book, it isn’t; nor is it run of the mill. It is the book which sowed the seed for John Buchan’s Richard Hannay, for Indiana Jones and James Bond, and though less slick than its successors, its ...”

“... long public letters of exasperated explanation. Against this background, it is difficult to read Bitter Fame without acknowledging a strong dose of prejudice, suspicion, even hostility. So much of Anne Stevenson’s material has already come filtered through the earlier biographical writing, Letters Home, the Journals (published in the United States but ...”

“... never have been published at all had it not been for the intercession of the poet and translator Richard Howard, who was introduced to White by a friend who had met Howard at a West Village pick-up bar. Howard liked White’s manuscript, suggested revisions and eventually persuaded Random House to publish it. The publisher demanded that the ending be changed ...”

“... time I was working, one floor below his, in collaboration with his formidable ideological critic Richard Lewontin – the second of the remarkable triumvirate who inhabit the Museum (the third, in the basement, is Stephen Jay Gould). Lewontin claims that when the conflict between them was at its most intense, Wilson wouldn’t even get into the lift between ...”