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“... delay. I have of course complied on every occasion and now it’s just a question of attending in Berkeley Square when I imagine Ronnie Barker will hand over the prize. Trusting that a similar scheme was now envisaged by the Bradford Exchange to whose London office in Wembley my three similar missives were to be returned in the event of non-delivery, I opened ...”

“... bred up into the Large White, ‘which slipped quietly and largely unnoticed into the Vale of Berkeley’. It is a beautiful picture, which you can believe if you like. Nowadays, the British Pig Association recognises 12 breeds: the Large and Middle Whites, the Tamworth, the Berkshire, British Saddlebacks, Chester Whites, Gloucester Old ...”

“... see no particular virtue in photographic accuracy. Joyce could learn nothing from Thackeray or George Eliot. The point of literature was to transfigure reality, not to reflect it – which is why, from the heretical medieval philosopher John Scottus Eriugena to Bishop Berkeley and W.B. Yeats, there is such a robust Irish ...”

“... Weed – not a name that would necessarily wish fame upon itself. He won a teaching fellowship at Berkeley, and she went with him, enrolling as an undergraduate, eventually to do art history – ‘I had been surrounded by art all of my life.’ It was then 1972; the student rebellions of the previous decade, ‘abhorred’ by her mother ‘for trying to ...”

“... record that Johnson made any effort to restrain the limb with which he was about to refute Bishop Berkeley. It is because we cannot help our gestures that so much effort has been put, over the centuries, into classifying and regulating them. Traces of this effort survive: in the manuals compiled for orators, actors, preachers; in legal depositions and ...”

“... the scene. In the 1740s the gout wars were heavily overshadowed by the pamphlets of Bishop Berkeley, the philosopher-quack who urged the use of tar water, internally or externally, for everything from gout in gentlemen to glanders in horses, from taedium vitae in scholars to the vapours in women and stupidity in infants; as a healing cordial it was ...”

“... days of his success, his black-faced, mammy-singing disciples included not only Eddie Cantor, George Burns, George Jessel and Sophie Tucker, but the future movie mogul Harry Cohn, the young Walter Winchell and his own older brother. Signed by the Shubert Brothers in 1911, Jolson was the first product of the bastard ...”

“... Laboratory included Enrico Fermi, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Robert Wood, E.O. Lawrence, George Kistiakowsky, Leo Szilárd, the Compton brothers (Arthur and Karl) and Albert Einstein. One newspaper columnist observed Loomis’s odd form of philanthropy: ‘In Tuxedo Park, his home, he has built the Loomis Laboratories, and any scientist who wishes to ...”

“... Man and the Masks, Richard Ellmann wrote about 46 Palmerston Road in Rathmines in Dublin, where George Yeats lived between her husband’s death in 1939 and her own death almost thirty years later. Mrs Yeats lived, Ellmann wrote, among the dead poet’s papers. ‘There in the bookcases was his working library, often heavily annotated, and in cabinets and ...”

“... In January 1957 the New York Police Department arrested a man called George Metesky, whose activities over the previous 16 and a bit years had earned him the sobriquet ‘the Mad Bomber’. The Bomber had planted more than thirty explosive devices, favouring public places such as cinemas, train stations, libraries and phone booths ...”

“... of the students had prepared a scene from Medea in the style and accents of The Godfather; the Berkeley-trained young professor kept jumping up to write phrases in the original Greek on the blackboard, and students argued fiercely over different translations and texts. The ease of intellectual life enjoyed by Gettysburg faculty, quite a few of whom commute ...”

“... does anyone steadily see what we do to each other all the time? This is Cavell’s version of what George Eliot once called ‘the fact of frequency’. Do we ‘recognise what we are capable of in the undramatic, repetitive, daily confrontations’ to which these more visible stories call attention? If we do, we shall see that in our slights of one ...”

“... When, in the summer of 1898, at the age of 56, William James went to Berkeley, California to deliver a series of lectures on pragmatism, he could have used his own life to illustrate the immensely difficult but successful application of one of its tenets: that truth is best seen as ‘what it is better for us to believe’, not as ‘as an accurate representation of reality’, and that what is better for us to believe is what can be ascertained only in and through our actions, not by consultation with fixed ideas or traditions or, notably in his case, by family example ...”

“... in the head – writing, it turns out, wasn’t enough. Brissenden was based on the Bay Area poet George Sterling, a friend of London’s who didn’t actually commit suicide until 17 years after Martin Eden was published (he used cyanide). Ruth had a real-life model too, Mabel Applegarth, though the views she expresses seem to be London’s. ‘If I were a ...”

“... rather in the manner that Samuel Johnson, by stubbing his foot against a rock, claimed to refute Berkeley: what was lost as a formal exercise was pure gain as an object lesson. For Crossman remained incorrigibly attached to the habits and training of an academic milieu without ever forgetting that it was as an intellectual in politics that he had a peculiar ...”