“... The only difference I can find is that two private collectors, Frederick B. Adams and Richard Little Purdy, have extended to Hynes facilities they denied to Gibson, and that Hardy’s 32 charming and often witty drawings for Wessex Poems are now restored to the text. This makes this Oxford edition a very pretty book, if that’s what you’re looking ...”

“... by John Bayley which the paper will be publishing shortly: but I would like to diarise a little about this piece of Antipodean duality. Like other strange stories of the genre, it both embodies and attracts coincidence. A strong pang was felt when my eye travelled to page 15 and lit on the magic words: ‘When he first saw how enchanted I was by this ...”

“... to analyse admittedly continuous processes as though they were made up of a series of discrete little steps. The Columbia space shuttle displayed on the world map of Mission Control centre at Houston has its position changed every 20 seconds, even though the facts are that its position changes continuously. For NASA, 20-second digital sampling is adequate ...”

“... him, still on his back, to cast an eye over his person, whereupon he finds that she has left a little memento of herself – a Freudian gift, hard, compact, warm, in its own way perfectly formed, a faecal offering smelling of fish and pasta (of tagliatelle marinara) – nestling among the soft hairs of his chest, only inches from his gaping mouth.’ The ...”

“... signa efficientia.’ This, urges Professor Kelly, is absurd. Daily life demands from language little sublimity but a near-infinity of routine. Translation, seen as a whole, must reflect this distribution. But all too often ‘the literary theorist is not concerned with the ordinary uses of language; and the hermeneutic theorist has misinterpreted the ...”

“... anonymity’ and without ‘local allegiance’. They also acted, however, with little challenge from Hautefaye’s inhabitants. A priest, a pit sawyer and one or two tenant farmers showed courage as they tried to extricate the victim, but the complicit silence of other neighbours sealed Monéys’s fate. Mentioned only in passing by ...”

“... Genghis, ‘a father concerned for the well-being of his family’ (Ratchnevsky) was surely as little above ‘political considerations’ (Ratchnevsky again) as any European contemporary concerned with dynastic stability. Given the tenor of its predecessors, then, one cannot blame Ratchnevsky’s biography for bringing forward such qualities as simplicity ...”

“... is neither here nor there,’ he said when Seaman told him what he wanted to do. ‘It is just a little sport and amusement, and leads to nothing.’ His snobbish mother was more indulgent, and at Cambridge he began to race the Riley nine-speed he had acquired for his 18th birthday. In his first race, a hill climb, he came second of two entrants, twenty ...”

“... has been overlaid: in the last two hundred years, all parts of the continent have been renamed. A little over a year ago, two historical items were put on the Memory of the World Register (the list of documentary heritage launched in 1997): James Cook’s journal of the Endeavour, written in his own hand; and the Edward Koiki Mabo Papers, the record of Eddie ...”

“... hanged on 15 November 1942. While not all the lives Palmier writes about are quite like this, very little space in his enormous compendium is given over to the success stories. Perhaps the luckiest form of desolation was the purely spiritual, the longing for a past homeland experienced at a distance and in conditions of relative ease. More often we read of ...”

“... The genre got off to a cracking start a long time ago with Marion Crawford’s book about the Little Princesses. That really set the standard: ‘Crawfie’, the former governess, got excommunicated, everybody (except the reader) felt betrayed, and the world of the British royals suddenly seemed quite comic. Dozens of volumes followed suit, but some, like ...”

“... have, on the whole, confined their interests to a resolutely British Atlantic world, paying little or no attention to those other Atlantics – Iberian, French and Dutch – that need to be included if we are ever to arrive at an integrated history. Even so, this geographically restricted approach has yielded rich rewards. There is a greater awareness ...”

“... what was known as a ‘thrupenny upright’, along with more costly horizontal favours, felt little threat from male prostitutes who looked like men, since it was unlikely that punters attracted to them would fancy women as well. Relations between women sex workers and the ‘gaggles of Mary-Anns waggling their scrawny arses up and down the street’, as ...”

“... of Realms of Memory, and the quality of the translation itself isn’t a patch on those done by Arthur Goldhammer, which might lead some to fear we’re being given only leftovers. In fact the riches of Les Lieux de mémoire are so considerable that even after all three of the new English volumes have appeared, approximately a third of the original will ...”

“... whites protesting against court-mandated school desegregation. In 1974, a federal judge, W. Arthur Garrity Jr, had ordered the Boston school district to remedy its racial imbalance by sending students, usually by bus, to schools outside their racially homogeneous neighbourhoods. Boston’s whites – mostly Irish Catholic and fiercely turf-conscious ...”