“... is certainly that of a well-educated and psychologically stable man. And Trollope’s own brother, Thomas, declared that the Autobiography account of their childhood years was too much en noir. But Super sometimes seems to tilt inconvenient evidence his way. One of the clinching confirmations of Anthony’s account of his wretched schooldays came from Sir ...”

“... survey, The Microcosm of London, includes a scene at Christie’s, illustrated by A.C. Pugin and Thomas Rowlandson, which shows the saleroom thronged with people of all sorts and classes, most of them taking no part in the sale, having come principally to see, be seen, or get out of the cold. Private auction houses were now responsible for more than 90 per ...”

“... Three months before plague struck Stratford, a young woman named Mary gave birth there to a son, William. She and her husband had lost their first two children, Joan and Margaret, in infancy. The prospects for their newborn’s survival – and perhaps their own – must have seemed grim. Just a few doors down from their home on Henley Street, their ...”

“... Colleagues shunned him; the FBI investigated him; congressional subcommittees harassed him; and William F. Buckley taunted him with nicknames like ‘Sherbert Matthews’. He also received death threats from Cuban exiles in Miami, and once had to flee a platform at the University of New Mexico because the local police believed there might be a bomb in the ...”

“... admiration for this as a dedication. There can be no intrinsic objection to such a dedication as Thomas Moore’s, of Lalla Rookh: – To Samuel Rogers, Esq., this Eastern Romance is inscribed by his very grateful and affectionate friend, Thomas Moore. But one may object that is not so interesting or original in its ...”

“... no’ (1960), for instance, Enright elevates his rejection of the flamboyance of Dylan Thomas and the Apocalyptics into a moral injunction: Epochs of parakeets, of peacocks, of paradisiac birds – Then one bald owl croaked, No. Such table-thumping seems a bit dated now – one is inadvertently reminded of television’s ‘Just Say ...”

“... at interrogation centred upon food rather than sex. English diarists – Evelyn as well as Pepys, Thomas Turner as well as Parson Woodforde – confide their meals to paper as readily as their other concerns. One reason why Keats makes better reading than Shelley is that he had a superior gust for eating and drinking, and found a language for it in verse and ...”

“... of which one is reminded by both Mordecai Richler’s anthology and Ernestine Schlant and Thomas Rimer’s collection of essays. There’s the fact, among many other examples, that US air bases on Japanese territory, acquired at the end of the Second World War, were used against Vietnam. There is the durability of Central European anti-semitism. And ...”

“... the proposal to establish an Anglo-Saxon-based school of English at Oxford, the moral philosopher Thomas Case protested that ‘an English School will grow up, nourishing our language not from the humanity of the Greeks and Romans, but from the savagery of the Goths and Anglo-Saxons. We are about to reverse the Renaissance.’ Not for the first time, an ...”

“... off by ‘Ossian’, continued by Gray’s translations from the Norse, and in particular by Thomas Percy’s 1763 Five Pieces of Runic Poetry. Percy popularised one of the most enduring clichés of the genre, that Vikings were in the habit of drinking out of their enemies’ skulls, which stemmed from a misunderstanding of the complex Norse poetic ...”

“... because of the contradictory manifestations of Modernist effort – how does one reconcile Thomas Mann and Andy Warhol? – he can’t help but see the Modernist instinct as essentially an affirmative urge. Two-thirds of the way through his book, Gay states bluntly that ‘liberalism’ was the ‘fundamental principle of Modernism’. But whose ...”

“... work was required to keep the country stable. He had grown up in the shadow of his famous father, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, who was for forty years the bedrock of Elizabeth I’s government, and learned his complicated profession at his father’s side, as the elder Cecil struggled to maintain the Elizabethan regime. It is clear that father and son rarely ...”

“... A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, a book with a sharp edge, he wrote to his friend William Dean Howells that too many subjects had escaped his wrath. ‘They burn in me; and they keep multiplying … but now they can’t ever be said. And besides, they would require a library – and a pen warmed-up in hell.’ This was a late ...”

“... around now that’s any good, either, which is to overlook not only the work of such writers as William Gibson and Jonathan Lethem, but also Ronald Moore’s remake of Battlestar Galactica, a TV series that’s as intelligent, nuanced and unflinching an examination of the United States’ post-9/11 militarism, foreign policy and relation to the un-American ...”

“... translation it could almost be the beginning of an 18th-century epistolary novel; even more so in William Melmoth’s version from 1746: ‘I propose pursuing the remainder of my journey to the province partly in light vessels, and partly in post-chaises.’) Pliny didn’t collect and arrange the 121 letters in Book Ten himself: his audience is not posterity ...”