“... another way was the British Art Show 1990. This five-yearly exhibition was, by convention, a broad and pluralistic survey of current British art. The 1985 version had included a bit of everything, all ages and genres, and had duly acknowledged a revival of figuration. In 1990 it was very different. The selection was not ‘representative’. No artist ...”

“... entries, since these were laid down by the editorial team and represented an attempt to secure broad parity of treatment for individuals of broadly comparable ‘importance’. It is mildly paradoxical that a figure about whose life we know very little emerges by this measure as the undisputed Top British Person: ...”

“... cautious revelations of steelier qualities. But despite the environmentally friendly metropolitan broad-mindedness Cameron transmits, and whatever he smoked behind the Eton bike sheds, what’s most arresting about the Tory leader is that he and many of his closest lieutenants are only very superficially reconstructed representatives of the old-fashioned ...”

“... It’s not conversation but the complacent burble of a radio on a windowsill. History is about as broad as Lowell gets, a custard-pie violence (‘smack! her sword divorces his codshead from the codpiece’ from ‘Judith’) and a strangely, disarmingly boyish thrall to heroism. You get vivid but cartoonish tropes like the ambush under the bridge (‘Down ...”

“... Isles) and bury local specificity. Briggs is too local and not local enough. Declaring these broad groupings – all helpful household spirits are Brownies, for example – risks losing what makes the spirits different from one another. It also gives a false impression of fixity in folklore, which is ever-changing and fuzzily bordered.Francis Young’s ...”

“... of the two in the writer’s work gives some sense of his giant reticent power of mind. To quote William Empson, on another subject: ‘The contradictions cover such a range’ – yet they are always reciprocal, in communication with each other. The meaning of Hamlet must be intrinsic with what in it holds audiences and readers. And, even if King Lear has ...”

“... of a physical crisis (appendicitis), which came on at the launch party for a friend’s novel – William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner – were interpreted as somatic manifestations of envy. But although there were gaps in his treatment, he went on seeing Kleinschmidt for five years. Then, in 1967, he discovered that Kleinschmidt had used material ...”

“... is even approximately right: not whether Darwin’s specific evolutionary ideas were powerful and broad (which they undoubtedly were) but whether they have marked the world in indelible ways and whether in fact they constitute the universal explanatory tool that some claim they do – whether, as Dawkins says, we ‘have no choice’ but to concede Darwinian ...”

“... by a stream. As a resolutely philistine teenager, I had no time for any of these. Even the great broad-shouldered tiger, glowering magnificently down on us in the dining-room – a copy of a well-known Ming original, so one was later led to believe – made scarcely any conscious impression on me. Only the Ch’ing Ping M’ei, a domesticated version of the ...”

“... filmed in Oxford and good-looking students dressed in wing-collars and boaters were darting down Broad Street as extras, enjoyment of Firbank’s wit and camp was in the air, a generational thing, and a sophisticated taste that looked back quite naturally through Waugh to the writer who had been so formative of him.Moreover, Brigid Brophy, an intelligent and ...”

“... Dennis when he was that age.’ She told me that at their meeting she had mentioned their parents, William and Eleanor Wood, who lived a short train journey away in London, and whom my father hadn’t seen for a decade. She had come to ask him to get back in touch with them. ‘And it was very strange. Dennis just calmly said, “Oh, yes,” as if I was ...”

“... Circle of Flesh as Sheila Conway, an odd-looking précieuse with ‘the figure of a Valkyrie, the broad and candid face of a plain boy’ and the ‘puzzled eagerness’ in her eyes of ‘a woman who has found no means of provoking desire in men’. In what sounds like a fairly silly short story by her friend Max Ewing, she goes by the Firbankian name of Miss ...”

“... had been improved, the threshing machine had been invented, and crop rotation had taken hold. William Cobbett, in his Rural Rides – originally a column that appeared in the Political Register between 1822 and 1826 – captured the movements which created the basis of the farming world we know. Cobbett rode out on horseback to look at farms to the south ...”

“... Reiner Stach. Proust, expiring at 51, got just under a thousand apiece from Jean-Yves Tadié and William Carter; Joyce, at 59, eight hundred from Richard Ellmann. Moving down the scale to medium or lightweights, there is little reduction in size. If we confine ourselves to Britain, Martin Stannard produced a thousand pages on Evelyn Waugh, who died when he ...”

“... of Aughrim, about John Leo’s debts, and his run-ins with the owner of the local newspaper, William Hastings. All this and more can be discerned from census returns, court records and newspaper archives. And I imagined things that I couldn’t actually prove. I wondered if, when he was in Dublin (to get married, for example, or to help transport the ...”