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“... their subjects. I have something in common with Joyce, and with Wilde, is the modest assumption of Richard Ellmann. Max was a bit like me, implies Cecil. That brings them, and us, all the closer to the subject. It can also lead to misunderstanding. Oddly enough, as Cecil’s admirable biography shows, both he and Max understood Oscar Wilde a good deal better ...”

“... reasonable argument that if you are going to lose you may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb and stick to your principles. But Heffernan and Marqusee believe that the election could have been won and was lost largely because socialist principles were not stuck to. This is surely much more doubtful. Prima facie it is hard to see why people would vote ...”

“... you lose all hope,’ he says, ‘you can always find it again.’ And you sense that both he and Richard Ford would shake their heads if you were to read the novel as the dramatic monologue of a character whose optimism is merely an inversion of Richard Yates-style pessimism or a quality he’s been given to emphasise the ...”

“... idea of parachuting into the palace of Sarawak’s first minister, Taib, and presenting him with a lamb. Having buried the hatchet with the man whom he had been denouncing for years as a corrupt kleptocrat, he would then offer his services as an adviser. ‘If he accepts my offer, he could distinguish himself worldwide as the saviour of the ...”

“... Low’s minimal involvement in the action. In another chapter, mutton is literally dressed as lamb, when Low is embroiled in a mundane dispute about the quality of the meat supplied to his regiment. By the time Low gets a part – taking Baji Rao into custody – we are a quarter of the way through the book. Fortunately, Low soon meets two men who were ...”

“... The description of what we might call Pan prior, ‘the first chimpanzee’, is from an essay by Richard Wrangham in Tree of Origin. Like The Ape and the Sushi Master, Tree of Origin proposes that we (human beings) share with our near primate cousins some of the behaviour we like best in ourselves. Professional primate-watchers are usually wary of venturing ...”

“... details are not entirely accurate – Hans Driesch’s name is consistently misspelled and Richard Dawkins is awarded a Nobel Prize (in what field?) – but Kolata is particularly good at providing accessible explanations of scientific ideas and achievements, and even those who know very little about contemporary biology should be able to follow ...”

“... Morris Zapp. Lodge had got his significant detail wrong – Swallow should be a scholar of Charles Lamb (the ‘gentle-hearted’) – but the broad allusion did pretty much what was wanted, assuring the theoretically advanced that they were now top dogs. Condescension usually has an anxious motive. Eliot, as Tom Paulin is on hand to say, was working from a ...”

“... down and going down, though there’s no doubt which one the audience prefers. 22 January. Take Richard Buckle’s autobiography, The Most Upsetting Woman, out of the London Library in order to refresh my memory of the Diaghilev exhibition in 1954. Buckle had organised it and put it on first at the Edinburgh Festival (a much smarter venue then than it is ...”

“... read Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe (1682), with its delicate possible parallel between the dunce writer Richard Flecknoe and Charles II, but not Nero the Second. Charles can’t be twinned with Flecknoe as straightforwardly as George I with Nero but, as Keymer shows, it’s the non-straightforwardness of the parallel – the way it’s built up from detail to ...”

“... Feake, who believed in rule by what his colleague Aspinwall called ‘the military officers of the lamb’? The experience of defeat is a rich theme, which calls for much further work in the years after 1660. This book is still to be written: what Mr Hill has given us here is rather a series of occasional pieces, concentrating on radical figures, but not to ...”

“... satires is the cartoon showing just two sombre figures, Edmund Burke and the Reverend Dr Richard Price. It was Price’s republican sermon ‘On the Love of Our Country’ that had given Burke the pretext for his Reflections on the Revolution in France. Gillray entitled his double portrait Smelling out a Rat; – or – the Atheistical-Revolutionist ...”

“... marker that never quite blends with the elegiac intent. The boy in The Morning Watch is called Richard, but he is the same character as Rufus in A Death in the Family, now at the edge of puberty. The death of his father is mentioned and it is the same death: a car accident, a concussion, the mother saying they will not see their father ‘ever any ...”

“... of Englishness is achieved: he looks after his pheasants, she her peasants. Tory lion and radical lamb lie down together.The Huxleys had no need of Mary’s handouts (unlike her many other impecunious relatives) and their pedigree was as distinguished intellectually as that of the Arnolds, if distinctly less pious. Mary could, however, help Leonard escape the ...”

“... to whom the book was dedicated: ‘I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb ... Lord, when shall we be done growing? As long as we have anything more to do, we have done nothing. So, now, let us add Moby Dick to our blessing, and step from that. Leviathan is not the biggest fish; – I have heard of Krakens’ (a fabulous ...”