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“... the specialist, wrote for circles of experts. The decline in reputation of amateurs such as Sir Joseph Banks and James Audubon, both of whom had counted themselves as naturalists, was largely the result of their failure to contribute to the growing body of specialist literature. Coleridge, a careful student of the Linnaean tradition, objected that the ...”

“... not so much among the moors and winds and harebells as in the kitchen and scullery with Nellie and Joseph. As a novel it contains no hint of interest in human individuality or psychology, which was no doubt why Ivy Compton-Burnett pronounced it powerful but hollow, a masterpiece both striking and meaningless. Emily, then, was much less wholeheartedly in her ...”

“... at the top of their power. They stood for pain. The stone on my other side was in memory of ‘Frank Cyril Nicholson, who died January 13th 1897, aged 14 years’. It was a cool day, very quiet at times, then some horn or deep engine on the dual carriageway would break in. Frank Cyril died after 14 years; died, it ...”

“... of this one’s father, had originally got the young man into the Company service. A cousin, Joseph Wordsworth, was third mate on the Abergavenny, following his cousin the captain on the way to the top. One did not become a captain in the Company’s service simply by individual merit; this was not exactly a career open to the talents. John had also ...”

“... is correct, although it remains the case that they haven’t been directly observed. In 1969, Joseph Weber announced that he had detected gravitational waves, but with an intensity far greater than the theory would have expected. This persuaded other experimentalists to build detectors similar to his, but his results were never replicated and have been ...”

“... moralist’ are unlikely to appear again in this essay, seeing as we’re dealing with Frank Sinatra, a man who managed, without much effort, to make the majority of his rowdy compatriots look like barefoot regulars in Bernadette’s grotto at Lourdes. It’s not that we could really have expected a straightforward portrait of ...”

“... a tradition going back to the Song of Songs (and here signifying their mystical marriage), while Joseph looks understandingly on. Steinberg (who throws in a catalogue of what he calls ‘chin-chucks’ stretching from antiquity to Proust and Nabokov) will have nothing to do with the notion that these images simply reflect the sort of thing that went on in ...”

“... waved the Transvaal flag in front of Trinity College. She left it to the males to burn effigies of Joseph Chamberlain, who, to the fury of all nationalists, had just been given an honorary degree by Trinity: but she wasn’t altogether surprised when they failed to burn even one. She should have seen to it herself. She did ensure, more or less ...”

“... War because it raised the hackles of Pan-Serbian nationalism. A welcome new biography of Francis Joseph by the French historian, Professor Jean-Paul Bled, comes as a useful and erudite reminder of all that, for the outcome of the annexation now has its painful parallel in the outcome of Europe’s hasty recognitions of breakaway fragments of what is no ...”

“... another explicit sexual encounter of predictably little literary effect. The author tries to be frank and decent and open about it, but can’t, because the girlie magazines have got there first and muddied that pool. There were phrases elsewhere that I liked without comprehending – ‘ “It is the harvest of Orion!” cries Beth, and her shadow falls ...”

“... Isle of Man, in 1858. His father was a sculptor and stonemason: so were two of his four brothers, Joseph and Mark. Robert became a jeweller, while Charles was a churchman, who moved to India where he became a chaplain in Delhi as well as a folklorist. The stories contained in his book Romantic Tales from the Punjab, were, he said, of the ‘highest possible ...”

“... harpsichord lessons from Ralph Kirkpatrick, and, like Moore, admired the intricate little boxes of Joseph Cornell. Early in their acquaintance Bishop, 23 at the time, published an essay on Gerard Manley Hopkins which Moore admired so much that she quoted it in a letter to Pound. It spoke of ‘the way in which the rhythm of a poem keeps up with itself like an ...”

“... therefore buggers for a sequinned frock. The most brazen hijack of Wilde’s life is performed by Frank Harris’s biography, a generous, boastful book whose shameless exaggerations have the uncanny ring of authenticity. (True to the disingenuous spirit of the memoir, Robinson’s welcome reprint has ‘Now a major film starring Stephen Fry’ splashed across ...”

“... when Boswell pays an early visit to Bolt Court and Johnson barks ‘briskly’ from his bed: ‘Frank, go and get coffee and let us breakfast in splendour.’ And he is there late at night, when Boswell is too tired and tanked-up and talked-out to go back to his lodgings, and is settled into the spare room ‘by honest Francis with a most civil ...”

“... and bulging around her as old flesh does. Jeremy Lewison in the catalogue calls it a ‘brutally frank self assessment’, ‘the obverse of a pin-up girl’. But brutal is the wrong word. It is certainly truthful about how things look, selectively truthful in the things it chooses to emphasise or simplify, aggressive perhaps, in the way of people who ...”