“... feet of his dead twin brother’s corpse. That makes the passage from Homer instantly something more than a translation: ‘Patroclus, dear brother, I shall do as you ask: I’ll see to the arrangements for your funeral. But Come closer now, for a moment let us embrace And wail in excruciating lamentation.’ He reached out but he couldn’t get hold of ...”

“... actor. In a sluggish movie we keep looking at our watch and it seems to have stopped. Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice is more slow than sluggish but pretty sluggish all the same. Anderson wrote the adaptation himself and clearly loves the 2009 Thomas Pynchon novel he is ...”

“... Nash’s Olden Time as the late Tudor and early Stuart period, though he could have said more about the long literary tradition of ‘Old English hospitality’, which generated the Victorian lithographs. It originated with the nostalgia of Elizabethan Catholics for the dissolved monasteries; it continued with Jacobean laments about the gentry ...”

“... a series of books published nearly thirty years ago by Hugh Trevor-Roper, Alan Macfarlane, Keith Thomas and Erik Midelfort. Until very recently, however, it was the history of trials on the Continent alone that seemed a lively subject, and in 1996 Diane Purkiss could still properly complain of ‘the torpor of English witchcraft studies’. It was as if ...”

“... Interior of the Colony. Skyscraper cliffs keep this green garden dark. The Obelisk is sandstone. Thomas Mort Is also present, bronze on a tall plinth – His plain Victorian three-piece suit bulks large, Befitting Sydney’s first successful exporter Of refrigerated foods – while, lower down This plush declivity, one finds a bubbler Superfluously shaded by ...”

“... both rights and reason are under several kinds of open and covert attack, the life and writing of Thomas Paine will always be part of the arsenal on which we shall need to depend.’ In the event, between the dedication and the final sentence the book says nothing about Iraq or the war on terror, perhaps in silent acknowledgment of the difficulty of knowing ...”

“... to come out of 18th-century Newburyport, Massachusetts was the lengthy autobiography of one of its more colourful citizens, which did not contain a single full stop. Instead, the author provided the reader with a generous assortment of punctuation marks in an appendix, along with an invitation to ‘add salt and pepper as you please.’ In a 1936 ...”

“... Before explaining why Stroud believes that this is not the case, let me describe the view more fully. The new science of the 17th century was brought into existence when Galileo and Newton developed a quantitative geometrical understanding of the physical world and the laws governing it, a description that left out the familiar qualitative aspects of ...”

“... a transgression-heavy sense of the book trade: a life of quiet, steady work leaves little trace. More visible are the pewterer and shoemaker who were whipped ‘arse naked’ while tied to a cart being drawn through the City’s marketplaces in April 1545. Papers pinned to the cart declared their offence in ‘castynge abrode … certeyn sedicious bylles ...”

“... reach is not to survive. In these pictures the faces of the living, helpless and hopeless, are more disturbing than the bodies of the dead. ‘I would rather be tied to the soil as another man’s serf, even a poor man’s, who hadn’t much to live on himself, than be King of all these the dead and destroyed.’ Homer’s words might have been written for ...”

“... president sinking precipitously in the polls, the Supreme Court vacancies represented a challenge more than an opportunity. Could the president manage to maintain the support of 55 Republican senators when he was no longer a political asset in the upcoming elections in 2006 and beyond? His nominations showed that, in this area at least, he no longer suffers ...”

“... Sir Thomas Urquhart, who is known today, if at all, as the 17th-century translator of part of Rabelais, must have been a most peculiar man. At a guess, he may have had to a preternatural degree that quality of mind, not unknown among modern scholars, that causes a man to believe that whatever he thinks, says or does is infallibly true and right, and that whatever he observes in the world is true and right only insofar as it coincides with what is already in his mind ...”

“... since abandoned. The LCS was never very large: at its most successful, it may never have contained more than three thousand active, paid-up members, though many more thousands must have attended a few meetings, even joined it briefly, then hurriedly left or slowly drifted away. In bad times its membership dwindled away to a ...”

“... equal lustre, nor omitting ceremonies of bravery in the infamy of his nature.’ Thus the good Sir Thomas Browne, meditating on urns, and on mankind’s dealings with the last mystery. Sumerian Gilgamesh journeyed to the Garden of the Sun at the world’s end to find the herb of eternal youth; but when he bent to drink at a fountain, a serpent stole ...”

“... to medicine and public health in the last three centuries. His reading of her character would be more persuasive if she were occasionally given the benefit of a doubt. Was she, for instance, always impelled ‘to fight, to cheat, to bully and to boast’ as well as ‘to save lives’? And is it not the case that without the private character we could not ...”