“... some years later, but not in both periods. It is, for example, as if Keats perished and John Clare went mad so that their contemporary, Carlyle, could emerge. Babbage was older than any of these men, but he did not conceive his Difference Engine until the year of Keats’s death. Strangely, the two were educated for a time at a pair of ...”

“... a poet was over, though he continued to work on, and eventually published, his translations of St John of the Cross, which many consider his most important work. In 1952 he moved again, this time to Portugal, and there, in 1957, he died in an automobile accident, in a car driven by his wife. Campbell has been called a Romantic (though he himself disliked the ...”

“... kiss, Africans copulate’). This thorough conspectus of the continent invites comparison with John Gunther’s Inside Africa, a survey done in the last days of colonialism, and, until events overtake it, The Africans should stand, in succession to Gunther, as the most accessible and comprehensive overview of the continent. The twenty-odd years since the ...”

“... noted such creatures down as dualisers. Dualisers have often appeared in philosophical debates. John Locke invoked baboons or ‘drills’, which are dualisers, in order to show that ‘the distinction of Species or Sorts, is not fixedly established by the real Frame, and secret Constitution of Things.’ Epicurus appealed to bats, which are dualisers, in ...”

“... as rational, calculable and rule-bound. The polarity operates clearly in an epigram coined by Sir John Davies in 1594: Publius, student at the common law, Oft leaves his books, and for his recreation, To Paris Garden doth himself withdraw, Where he is ravished with such delectation, As down among the bears and dogs he goes; Where, whilst he skipping ...”

“... guests to toss the sweets about, in the manner of latter-day subalterns hurling bread rolls. In John Evelyn’s time the banquet ‘stuff’ was still being flung around the room profusely. Eventually, it seems, sweet-throwing hooligans were weaned onto confetti. Aniseed balls, resembling dark red marbles, were never the epicure’s first choice of ...”

“... Recent interpretations of Medea have tended to focus on issues of gender and race, portraying her either as a feminist challenging Jason’s misogyny, or as a freedom fighter on behalf of the oppressed Colchian immigrants in Corinth. In what remains the best-known version of her myth, the one created by Euripides in 431 BC, her actions turn out to be as violent and tyrannical as those of her oppressors, as she kills her own children in a quest for revenge ...”

“... were charged with wilful murder, but we are not told the outcome. Happier to relate, in 1801 John Newton, forty years a naval lieutenant, was paid off at Plymouth with the tribute that ‘never was there a more orderly set of men than the seamen and landmen in Newton’s service’ and recording that ‘the gallant veteran’ had raised three thousand ...”

“... and the language of convicts, solicitors and medics did find its way into the writing.’ In 1946, John Betjeman said that his ideal second occupation would be ‘station-master on a small country branch line (single track)’. And when writers now are questioned about second jobs, a similar wistfulness descends. Julian Barnes probably speaks for most of his ...”

“... written records of disciples. From a purely literary point of view, Plato, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were more talented and conscientious than the scribes who compiled Confucius’ wisdom. Even if more people have read the Analects than Plato’s Dialogues or the Gospels, and even if its message has influenced more people than they have, it is inferior to ...”

“... fiction of Paley’s neighbour and good friend Donald Barthelme. The gargantuan mock-epics of John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat-Boy, now little-read, were much praised at the time, and the ‘literature of exhaustion’ was the literature of the future – if there was a future for humanistic literature at all. Like a number of realist ...”

“... is not a conventional history. It is not, for example, meant to compete with the standard work, John Ramsden’s volumes in the history of the Conservative Party, or with other histories which carry the story forward to the present day. It is rather an essay, or series of essays, on themes and issues with which Ian Gilmour was and is himself involved ...”

“... was not tempting. Her mother’s example provided a bleak warning of the hazards of licence. John Chapman, publisher and sexual opportunist, tried very hard to persuade her to give herself (and her money) to him, arguing that she ‘would be able without fear and undue anxiety and without the knowledge of the world to be really united with me and to look ...”

“... of Wight’. It is possible that Barnes may not have read Williams-Ellis: he may only have read John Gaze’s history of the National Trust, Figures in a Landscape (1988), which discusses Williams-Ellis’s vision, or perhaps Patrick Wright’s A Journey through Ruins (1991), which quotes Gaze quoting Williams-Ellis, or perhaps one of the countless other ...”

“... odd fish?’ Severn also asked, and Crane’s book is an attempt to answer that question. Edward John Trelawny was born in 1792 and died in 1881. In his later years he was a legendary figure, farouche and craggy, a solitary survivor from an epoch which already seemed fabulously remote: here, living on deep into the later Victorian age was a man who had once ...”