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“... MacNeice and John Betjeman. Among his friends at Oxford were Isaiah Berlin, Maurice Bowra and Stephen Spender, with whom he coedited the magazine Oxford Poetry in 1930. In his excellent introduction to this definitive Complete Poetry, Peter Robinson characterises Spencer as an unconfident poet who, when his luck was in, wrote poems that were ‘profoundly ...”

“... Foxe said he had never read anything ‘less pleasant, more choppy or more rebarbative’ than Stephen Gardiner’s prose (‘he spirals off so wildly that he needs a Sibyl rather than a translator’); Balthasar Moretus of the Plantin company complained that one author’s ‘writing, which is not so much inelegant as simply full of mistakes, terrifies ...”

“... just you try winking across the footlights when playing Mouth in Not I, with only a small area of your face left visible. He went to great lengths to strip the humanity from the speaker in that play, who possesses nothing but the words she disowns (by making out she’s recounting someone else’s experience), and then reconstituted it in the ...”

“... anxiety in many battles over literary estates is familial: whether patrimony, as in the case of Stephen Joyce, who terrorised scholars with his capricious restrictions on quotation from his grandfather’s published work until it came out of copyright last year; or the lateral bonds of marriage, which produce similar dramas of insecurity. (Valerie Eliot ...”

“... which he wrote. Van Es’s book is a more conventionally academic study than Shapiro’s, or than Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World (2004), less sprightly in its prose and weighed down with scholarly apparatus. Yet, though they are barely cited, Shakespeare in Company is very much an extension of Greenblatt’s and Shapiro’s work, whose mode of ...”

“... one-to-one mapping of a square onto itself) discussed by mathematicians such as Stephen Smale and applies the model to historical time as the starting point for a series of reflections on the idea of progress, the invention of tradition and the importance of anachronism. But it was during the 1970s that science and technology marked ...”

“... than 70 per cent of the vote were Labour. The only one to win more than forty thousand votes was Stephen Timms (East Ham), who also had the third largest majority. In the early 1950s Labour had huge and useless majorities in the mining seats; now these majorities are in the cities. The problem is its results outside urban areas: Labour made no serious ...”

“... Geoffroy’s enthusiasm for transformationism – as evolution was known in those days – was, in Stephen Jay Gould’s accurate assessment, ‘fitful’ at best. Even the outcome has been subject to revision. Goethe may have considered Geoffroy the winner, but others have with equal conviction accorded Cuvier the laurels, seeing his as a victory of sound ...”

“... The overthrow of the awful Edwardians, the triumph of Bloomsbury over the Kensington of Leslie Stephen, were unmitigated joys. Lehmann, who published her first novel, Dusty Answer, to sensational acclaim in 1927, smoked, danced and divorced her way through the interwar years with gayer abandon than most. During one particularly frank sexual discussion at a ...”

“... often try to harmonise the two by declaring that they are mutually exclusive domains, or, to use Stephen Jay Gould’s phrase, ‘non-overlapping magisteria’. Gould proposes that science limit itself to studying and explaining the natural world, and religion to studying human purposes, meanings and values. Michael Ruse’s book is an astonishing ...”

“... Marryat, were the illegitimate daughters of white men. They never married, allowing them to act as small businesswomen particularly in urban areas. White men were their route to a freedom which brought with it the possibility of enslaving others. The​ families Livesay has tracked tend to be those in which fathers felt some affection and concern, albeit with ...”

“... cream-coloured coursers thought fit to enter Egdon no more.’ The cream-coloured courser is a small and beautiful plover, just over ten inches tall. The colour of its plumage is a complicated mixture of whites, buffs, greys and browns that shade smoothly into each other and perhaps give the impression of cream, or pale sand. Its beak is black, its claws ...”

“... infrastructure projects: the building of the Forth rail bridge, or the construction by Leslie Stephen (himself a contributor to the OED) of his monumental Dictionary of National Biography.Ogilvie points out that for many years the OED wasn’t as stable or institutionally protected as such analogies suggest. Its founders were determined that their ...”

“... his. He died before he was able to turn to Proust’s last volume, which was translated first by Stephen Hudson and later by Andreas Mayor. In 1981 Terence Kilmartin published a revision of the whole text, making ‘extensive alterations’ but hoping to ‘have preserved the undoubted felicity’ of much of the work. The new wordings were a matter partly of ...”

“... like the human body:… Even now the world’s great age is brokenAnd earth worn out scarce bears small animals,…We wear out oxen, wear out the strength of farmers,Wear down the ploughshare in fields that can scarce feed us,So do they now grudge their fruits and multiply our toil.As Star observes, Lucretius reconfigures Hesiod’s narrative of human ...”