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“... It’s a relief. The centuries after Burns’s death have produced some honest fiction about him (James Barke’s quintet of novels are the best known). But there has also been a procession of biographers dressing their own Burns dolls in their own favourite costumes. There was the ‘heav’n-taught ploughman’ school, mourning an Ayrshire nightingale ...”

“... well in Britain, whose old colonial hands were more sceptical of his exotic mannerisms. His patron Edward Toronto Sturdy, a rich but ascetic Anglo-Canadian who had lived in India with a Brahmin cook, concluded that the eminent scholar Friedrich Max Müller was a sounder Vedantist than this corpulent, tobacco-stained guru who whinged about being forced to live ...”

“... to make a name for himself in the history of religion. Another friend, the anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor, had convinced him that myths originated independently around the world in the thought processes of ‘savage’ peoples. Such speculations contradicted the theories of Friedrich Max Müller, the comparative philologist who then dominated ...”

“... of them describing him as a ‘player’: St Leonard’s, Shoreditch, 12 July 1607: baptism of ‘Edward Shakesbye the sonne of Edward Shakesbye’. St Giles, Cripplegate, 12 August 1607: burial of ‘Edward sonne of Edward Shackspeere ...”

“... alter ego Jacob Rees-Mogg set up Somerset Capital Management with two friends, Dominic Johnson and Edward Robertson. Since its foundation SCM, which has a handful of staff in London and Singapore and contracts out most of its back-office functions, has grown to the point where it claims to manage more than $7 billion of other people’s money. Rees-Mogg was ...”

“... Abrahamus Trippie and Jacobus Depre. (The two Jacobi would, of course, be Jacques in French and James in English. Mullett is elsewhere written as Millett, and Trippie as Tippey.) Mountjoy puts up £20 – half of the required bail – to guarantee their appearance at the forthcoming Sessions of the Peace, where they are ‘bound to answere their ...”

“... and training. Since 1913, Jones had been the sole president of the British Society, and Edward Glover, an abrasive and unpopular man, loomed as his heir. If the main plot of this epic personal and intellectual struggle is the collision between Klein and Anna Freud, its leading subplot is the downfall of Glover. This was the outcome of a bitter ...”

“... as being at once too ‘plotless’ (or, as Washington Irving put it – before Cooper, Hawthorne, James and others – too lacking in ‘association’) and ‘stiflingly, even obsessively over-plotted’. There is a relationship, in Fender’s reading of American literature, between plotting and landscape which can be ...”

“... no doubt merely reminded his mentor of the limited facilities for shaving in submarines: but James Joyce’s young man resents his friend’s analysis and calls him a sulphur-yellow liar. We do resent, it seems, having our erotic or quasi-erotic motives explained to us; perhaps not so much because we all feel the explanation to be false, though that ...”

“... of the world of today. Peter Pringle, formerly of the Sunday Times, now of the Observer, and James Spigelman, with civil service experience inside Gough Whitlam’s Government in Australia, have put together a remarkably well-informed, coherent and readable survey of this vast territory, clear and simple enough for the absolute beginner and yet full of ...”

“... Lighthouse by the great civil engineer John Smeaton; and the development of the steam engine by James Watt. There were also the achievements of James Cook, the son of a Yorkshire labourer, who, after surveying Newfoundland between 1763 and 1767, made three voyages to the Pacific, charting the coasts of New Zealand, the ...”

“... the hanging judge would have sat comfortably in a tradition of Scottish eccentricity that includes James Hogg’s The Shepherd’s Calendar, John Galt’s ‘theoretical histories’ and Margaret Oliphant’s tales of terror. It’s common to think of Blackwood’s as a stolid redoubt of middlebrow English respectability, the kind of torpid organ invoked by ...”

“... professor and Unitarian minister, his mother came from a distinguished Boston family. William James introduced the pair and became one of Edward Estlin’s godfathers. As well as the grand house at 104 Irving Street where he was born, Cummings’s family had a summer house in New Hampshire, which he would enjoy until ...”

“... to the left of the headword. Murray’s successors William Craigie and Charles Onions tussled over whether to maintain this practice. Proofs of the Supplement dated 11 September 1929 retain Murray’s so-called tramlines; in the next proofs, dated 2 July 1930, they are gone. Between these dates, Onions joined the BBC Advisory Committee on Spoken English, where he became acutely aware of the prejudices that led some people to stigmatise new or imported terms; tramlines, he felt, didn’t help ...”

“... while I was still working on my thesis, I’d had an unsuccessful interview in Washington with Edward Teller, who was recruiting for Livermore. He made an odd comment about preferring physics to politics. It was only much later that I realised my interview had taken place the day after he testified against Robert Oppenheimer. Another thing I didn’t know ...”