“... I have started a woodcock on the edge of a disused orchard, beside a triangle of meadow bordered by a hawthorn, ash and elder hedge full of brambles which the landlord of the Royal used to pick to use in his homemade icecream. In 20 years, 36 species of bird have visited our garden. Peregrine, kestrel and heron have flown over it. Fifteen minutes’ walk ...”

“... of his youthful excitement at the sublimity, the magnanimity in defence of liberty, aspired to by the Devil’s party. What was at stake was a cultural revolution which seemed to a few enthusiasts to open up immense possibilities. Marvell’s prefatory poem to Paradise Lost registers the sense of some of his generation that there had been losses in the ...”

“... as white as snow; she is just in her prime, and fit for business, she is broke in this spring, by a well-known gentleman of the turf. Her movements are regular, her pace elegant, and her action is good: and when you mount her, she begins to f—k away to the tune of the ‘Dandy O’. Her price, 5s. ‘She riggles her a—e su’ cantily.’ The ...”

“... its notorious editorial no-show. His Clarendon Lectures are unlikely to mean that Muldoon will be knocking down the wall between poetry and prose, but at least they represent a courtesy visit to the genre next door. In Macbeth Malcolm and Donalbain flee Scotland after Duncan’s murder, Malcolm to England; ‘To Ireland, I,’ says Donalbain, never to ...”

“... Lourdes had become one of the great pilgrimage sites of the world, and people flocked there by the thousand to bathe in water from a spring Soubirous had found, in order to gain relief from one debilitating illness or another. Sufferers have been flocking there ever since, usually after Pasteur’s successors in the medical profession have failed to ...”

“... There are people who believe themselves to be witches. One can find them without difficulty on the Internet, and on a recent canal trip I was surprised to pass a whole series of narrow-boats (Black Cat, Sorceress) apparently inhabited by practising witches. The modern scholarly literature on the history of witch beliefs and witch trials, however, first took shape in opposition to Margaret Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921), which claimed that Renaissance witches were worshippers of pagan gods ...”

“... subject implied, the great political economists of the 19th century knew that the economy cannot be studied fruitfully in isolation from the polity. The notion that there is, or should be, a distinct and autonomous discipline of ‘economics’, whose practitioners are solely concerned with economic relationships, and for ...”

“... philosophy of mathematics from him. It soon became clear that, if they worked together, it would be as equals rather than as tutor and pupil. When Russell showed Wittgenstein the book that he was writing, Wittgenstein produced for his inspection a manuscript of a very different character, Notes on Logic. Russell’s book is obviously a product of the English ...”

“... with his sights set surely on the sublime. Which of these is the real Elgar? It is difficult to be sure. For the picture is not only contradictory, it is also deceptive: a carefully contrived self-image masquerading as a spontaneous and unself-conscious record. The pensive pose, with the left hand on the cheek, and the gaze wistfully directed towards some ...”

“... of a wartime pilot was playing one of America’s most famous flyers was given an extra dimension by the fact that Shepard refuses ever to fly himself), but so also is the attempt to harness two main impulses of the American character: nostalgia for the straight old days of the West, and pride in a computerised space-age future. Shepard has always been an ...”

“... thoughtfully supplied us (British scholars bound for a conference on English literature organised by the University of Warsaw) with a list: soap, shampoo, washing powder, chocolate, sweets, batteries, notepaper, toilet paper, coffee, sugar … Most of us will spend the next few days trying to find ways of slipping these goodies to our Polish hosts without ...”

“... and even lament, the things they are in the process of destroying.’ You cannot, he seems to be saying, have conservation without destruction, or a stay of execution without a sentence. This is not, of course, a universally valid dictum. Even the combined and mellifluous resources of Mark Girouard and Yale University Press have yet to unfurl the full ...”

“... signs of the moral state of our people.’ Eighty years on, the prospects of England continue to be gloomed over. The evidence of deterioration mounts: not just butter now, but apples, cars, furniture. As for the moral state of the people ‘driving’ the cars and beating each other over the head with bits of the furniture ... don’t even ask. Ryecroft’s ...”

“... once and for all’); and the third claimed that many of Israel’s detractors were anti-semites. By that stage, Dr O’Brien had decided to write a book. His original intention was to produce a short one ‘of “current affairs” type’, with a brief prologue dealing with Zionism before 1948; in the end the prologue was extended to 286 pages and the whole ...”

“... has chosen ‘to prevent the appearance in her husband’s biography of any unpublished writings by him of whatever sort: letters, journals or random notations’. Another recent biography of a leading modern artist was composed under similar restrictions. Peter Ackroyd says he was ‘forbidden by the Eliot estate to quote ...”