“... its ironic blending of high and low, its whispered implication that things might be different. May not the Linnin of a Tiburn slave, More honour then a mighty Monarke have? That though he dyed a Traytor most disloyall, His Shirt may be transform’d to Paper royall. And may not dirty ...”

“... of the dying Marcia in Barbara Pym’s own Quartet in Autumn). Those who are sceptical of this may prefer another kind of explanation, more sociological or even political. It would involve some comment on the adequacy or otherwise of publishers’ readers, and on the principles or otherwise of publishers themselves, and on the reality or otherwise of ...”

“... narrative and publicly-known details of the author’s own life – though such a correspondence may be discernible – but the apparent attempt to claim credit and authority through the faithful rendering of real happenings, real responses. The story will be largely composed of gestures and speeches too trivial, inconsequent or banal to seem to merit ...”

“... it seemed, was the misguidedness, stupidity and sometimes dangerousness of religious belief. Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens: over the previous few years each had published a bestselling book condemning religion, and they were all rather pleased with themselves. Dawkins’s The God Delusion alone, with its compelling ...”

“... and Louis XI. The broader Renaissance interest in Classical coins, cameos, medals and medallions may also have been a factor.Precisely when, and where, the miniature first broke free of the manuscript page is also unclear. What is not in doubt is that, by the mid-1520s, free-standing circular busts of royal sitters in watercolour on vellum, and encased in ...”

“... supposed ‘goals’ of the Communist Party Historians Group in 1946-56, the realisation of which may be seen in A.L. Morton’s The World of the Ranters and Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down. At the same time, these and other historians wished to find precursors for the anti-hegemonic ‘hippy’ culture of the late 1960s, and Norman Cohn ...”

“... little treasure. Good looks don’t hurt but rate low on their own. The teenage girls who fall for Richard Gere Admit his face is random flesh and bone Beside Mel Gibson’s, that his skin lacks tone And when he smiles his pin eyes disappear. They go bananas when he bares his chest But torsos that outstrip his leave them cold. One bit of you might well be the ...”

“... Richard Wollheim’s memoir of his childhood, roughly a third of which appeared in two recent issues of the London Review (15 April and 20 May), is to be published in its entirety in September by the Waywiser Press. In his obituary of Wollheim in the Independent last November, John Richardson wrote that Germs – which Wollheim thought ‘the best piece of work’ he had ‘ever done’ – ‘must not be allowed to become a chef d’oeuvre inconnu ...”

“... series which concerns his finances, letters to his legal adviser, William Pyne, and to his tailor, Richard Culverwell. There has been a long upper-class tradition of owing money to one’s tailor – which, no doubt, explains the inordinate prices charged in those days. Disraeli, characteristically, went a step further and actually borrowed money from his ...”

“... with firm, frontally presented bodies or with devices that enhance its given texture. Thus stone may, in his metaphors, ‘disclose itself’ or ‘grow steadfastly’, emerging into ‘stone-blossom’. The ideal carver merely helps the stone to unfurl. Taken as prompts to interest English readers in distant Italian reliefs, these marine and vegetable ...”

“... of escape’ – escape from society. Finally (and to be taken foremost) is A Sort of Clowning by Richard Hoggart, perhaps the most usefully class-conscious English writer of our time. He created an accepted general idea of the British ‘working class’ in 1957, with The Uses of Literacy. He developed his concept, most recently, in his memoir, A Local ...”

“... Courtney; a prolific writer, she also produced a six-volume dictionary of female biography, and may have been the author of an Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Women. Understandably, the compilers of the DNB in its early years had a particular predilection for biographers, but they did not read the signs of the times so well as to believe ...”

“... whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall.’ The tract before the court, he went on, ‘would suggest to the minds of the young of either sex, or even to persons of more advanced years, thoughts of a most impure and libidinous character’. Here, couched in Victorian prose, was the erection ...”

“... The Origin of Species a day. By the time you read this, the project will be nearly done, though it may take another year to align the bits of sequence and fill in the gaps. As the most visible (and expensive) product of Big Biology, the human genome project has understandably attracted much public attention. The excitement stems not from decoding the genome of ...”

“... as looking like Hamlet’s aunt, and this must have made sense to most of his readers). We may therefore conclude that this is our culture’s leading night out: even in an electronic age, one of the best shows going. But it’s worth recalling that the word ‘show’ took on precisely this usage only late in the 19th century. When Shakespeare says of ...”