“... Roy Foster’s review in the New Republic was entitled ‘’Tisn’t’. But however unlikely his powers of recall or underdrawn his characters, McCourt’s books and manner are engaging. The historian Richard White describes his book as an ‘anti-memoir’. White, who teaches history at Stanford, has traced the story of another post-Independence immigrant ...”

“... hero; Agustín de Iturbide, the Mexican; Emperor Pedro I of Brazil; and, finally, Admiral Lord Thomas Cochrane, the astonishing Scottish maverick who played a key part in the liberation of Peru and the consolidation of Brazilian independence. It was not fashionable in the later 20th century to see history in terms of its great men. Yet however ...”

“... have intensified with the coming of digital and cybernetic technologies and their extraordinary powers of reproduction and animation; animators keep refining their techniques in order to conceal their use. The author of The Erotic Doll must be cursing his bad luck that he finished his book before the current show at the Hayward Gallery, The Human Factor ...”

“... to try to smooth things over, and has promised moderately enhanced tax-raising and spending powers for Scotland, but they are unlikely to be enough. Something else will have to give. What will it be? One obvious possibility is the electoral system itself. I said that the United Kingdom is currently more or less ungovernable, but really it’s only ...”

“... it up. Such episodes found their way into a play which satirised Wren and his fellow philosophers, Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso. Wren and Hooke gloomily discussed this satire’s Drury Lane success. Modish wit could be toxic for natural philosophy’s reputation. Summerson thought it significant that Wren’s mantle was inherited by the comic playwright ...”

“... must be secular and modern. Thus he pronounces Arias a ‘confident man sure of his professional powers, worldly knowledge and career: a Spanish renaissance man tracing the horizon of modernity’. But what if Yovel is wrong in his classifications of Catholic and Jewish? Medieval and early modern Catholics were not slavish in their devotions. They kept track ...”

“... to pay his legal costs when he was sued by the incurably litigious Lord Alfred Douglas. Edward Thomas was devoted to him. John Masefield drank claret with him at teatime as they sang sea shanties together in Ransome’s mother’s kitchen. And Ransome took to most people; he was not choosy. In fact, he was inclined to instant and lasting hero worship from ...”

“... a way out of terminal ennui.The saints and their wild doings, the angels and their extraordinary powers, now mischievously recorded by Eliot Weinberger, may have helped enliven the days assigned to them. The strangeness of such religious material again and again makes it incomprehensible that such figures should be considered holy, but if you look instead at ...”

“... in Proust. But something else was bubbling, his own eros, and success came to be measured by his powers of seduction as well as his academic prowess. Dustan kept on cruising men (and dating women) even after enrolling at the elite École Nationale d’Administration in 1988: ‘I didn’t want to blow my chances. I was made to succeed. To have a beautiful ...”

“... No American novelist​ has devoted as much energy as Percival Everett to the proper noun, its powers as engine, instrument and index. Towards the end of Percival Everett by Virgil Russell (first published in 2013), a story about storytelling in which nobody is called Percival Everett or Virgil Russell, one of the narrators gives a list of 516 gerunds that encompass the whole of human activity ...”

“... to living in a slum, and delivered his lectures in a tattered tailcoat. One of his supporters was Thomas Wakley, the editor of the Lancet, who in 1833 sent a shorthand writer to take down sixty comparative anatomy lectures given by Grant, and proceeded to publish them at the rate of one a week. In the course of two lectures on the osteology of birds, Grant ...”

“... Margaret Walker of Coggeshall in Essex lost her husband at Sherborne; he was in the revolutionary Thomas Rainborough’s regiment, and left her ‘a poor distressed widow’. There were hundreds of similar stories. Strangways was himself a victim. The man who proclaimed the king’s return to the town had been captured at the castle in 1645, imprisoned in ...”

“... own childhood. It often does. The comic war in Pantagruel is set in Utopia – Rabelais knew his Thomas More and borrowed from him both the thirsty Dipsodes and the obscure Amaurotes. In Gargantua he fits the rivalries between France and the Holy Roman Empire into the tiny world of castle, wood and ford which could be seen from the windows of his childhood ...”

“... of the upper classes, with his good temper and considerateness, his easy good manners and what Thomas Mann called his ‘boyhaft’ good looks. This affection, rarely reciprocated by English authors, goes back at least to the time of Herder and Goethe. Here is the Göttingen physicist and aphorist, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, writing in 1776, a quarter of ...”

“... well as the real sense of the celebrations was that he was still at the height of his prodigious powers. So it was very much as a public figure that Bloch addressed a distinguished audience at the Humboldt University in East Berlin in November 1956, on the occasion of the 125th anniversary of the death of Hegel. In tones that would have rejoiced the heart of ...”