“... led his platoon over the top on the first morning of the Battle of the Somme, holding a gun to one young man’s head to get him to stop crying and keep going. Almost immediately afterwards, Tawney himself was shot through the chest and abdomen and lay for 24 hours in no-man’s-land before being rescued. Although he lived with pain for the rest of his ...”

“... Tessimond’s poems uninspiring (‘impression of yr. work neutral’), but he did furnish the young poet with the addresses of a number of magazines in America and Europe, and a few years later This Quarter, based in Paris, published ‘A painting by Seurat’, which was among the batch submitted by Tessimond to il miglior fabbro for comment. On the back ...”

“... it may be an exaggeration to say that you get used to this way of writing, you learn to trust it. Young writers are routinely advised to find their voice, but for Irish writers voice is as much the problem as anything else. To indulge the national stereotype of garrulousness is one sort of trap, but it’s possible to react against it too much. Dublin talk is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... from the start, you were forced to admire Newton’s modesty, and his genius. The reviewer, the young astronomer Edmond Halley, knew what he was talking about. Three years earlier, during a visit to Cambridge, he had posed the puzzle which started Newton on the path to his Principia. What is the orbit of a planet under the influence of an attractive force ...”

“... to her, though she needs to move away from them if she is to defend them. Ben, the baby, is too young to feel a sense of emergency, but Viv, at three, is old enough both to co-operate and to do the opposite of what she’s told. Even when she follows instructions, success isn’t guaranteed. Asked to bring the bat from the closet – Molly means the ...”

“... of One’s Own, ‘formidable yet humble with her great forehead and her shabby dress’. As a young woman she gave throbbing lectures in spangled satin and Egyptian beads, and was painted by Augustus John in silks that don’t look too dusty. David Piper called it ‘the only existing humane portrait of a Lady Don’ and Harrison was pleased, thinking she ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... not remember history before Thebes and the Trojan War, if not because the world was comparatively young?For all this, it’s hard to escape the sense that Lucretius is prevaricating about when the apocalypse will come. As often as he hints that his readers may themselves witness the world’s collapse, he offers a reminder that the earth’s youth argues ...”

“... own, he wasn’t much of a teacher, but was a delightful presence. One of his students that term, Stephen Yenser, became not only a lifelong friend but one of Merrill’s very best readers, and co-editor, with J.D. McClatchy, of an excellent though overlong 2008 Selected Poems. Reading Merrill at length can feel like being trapped in endless rooms full of ...”

“... clarified alarmingly the discourse around the question of homosexuality in the years we were too young to know much about it; by the time the Sexual Offences Act is passed, at the end of his second volume, we were thirteen. I know I was alert by then to the word ‘homosexual’ as it appeared in headlines, and disturbed by this bold-faced naming of a ...”

“... stops of women, known as ‘booty patrols’. The following month, the Met paid damages to two young Black men who had been stopped and searched without cause and handcuffed for twenty minutes outside their East London home. An officer involved in the search turned out to have posted frequently in a racist and sexist WhatsApp group chat, one of many used ...”

“... VI ‘will go into history as the most disastrous my unhappy country has known since Matilda and Stephen’. The new Queen has already been seen in slacks. And the French revenge themselves on their liberators by sending camembert made from United Nations milk powder which turns to chalk and moss without ever ripening. (Does not some of it still slip ...”

“... from the sense it gives of having been thrown together with a pitchfork (in the phrase of Leslie Stephen), Biographia Literaria conceals idiosyncrasies not so easy to recognise. Coleridge writes in part to answer imputations about his marriage, but silently and completely omits from his life story any mention of it (or of the three children resulting from ...”

“... was, she says,born into the ocean of story, or on its shores. I was the first child of a lively young scientist who loved his country and his zoology. My mother died – he mothered me. I went to bed early and with the light falling from the street lamp through the open slats of the venetian blind he, with one foot on the rather strange bed I had, told his ...”