“... the English faculty’s lecture list for Trinity term 1996, I find that the Professor of Poetry, James Fenton, will give a lecture on 9 May entitled Eliot v. Julius. It would be improper of me to anticipate Fenton’s approach to Anthony Julius’s compelling study, but I would hope that he will not see fit to mount another repudiation of this ...”

“... won a new status for authorship, to befit the moral and educative role he claimed for it. Under James I the former bricklayer and soldier and brawler and convict, the one-time mediocre actor and hack adapter of other people’s plays, became the royal laureate, the friend of courtiers, diplomats and MPs, the honorand of universities. He was Britain’s ...”

“... not only smooth the conquering path of British commerce but contribute to the harmony of nations. Lord Palmerston, however, had less inclination to admire foreign models and none at all to adopt them. ‘Can you expect that the people of the United Kingdom will cast aside all the names of Space and weight and capacity which they learnt from their infancy and ...”

“... was that secrecy inevitably gave rise to corruption – ‘every thing secret degenerates,’ Lord Acton wrote. It was a ‘foreign’ trait, and in the form of covert surveillance, it was also believed to be counterproductive. Spying was supposed to sniff out unstable social elements, but stability depends on trust, and if people thought they were being ...”

“... by them. One example was familiar and acceptable to Charles Darwin: the successive offspring of Lord Morton’s mare. Crossed with a quagga (a now extinct zebra with stripes confined to neck and forequarters), the Arab mare delivered a hybrid with stripes in evidence. Subsequently mated with a black Arab stallion, the mare again produced an offspring ...”

“... camellias bloom at Christmas. The very competitive mathematician and ocean-wave expert Sir James Lighthill swam the ten miles around Sark five times; on his sixth attempt, in 1998, he ruptured a heart valve. Sark is the world’s first Dark Sky Island, benefiting from an absence of streetlights. Its leading politician became a powerboating world ...”

“... are caused by people wandering about. For example, the trial of the other Joyce – William Joyce, Lord Haw-Haw – demonstrated that a man born in Brooklyn and brought up in Ireland could be hanged as a British traitor for war crimes committed in Germany. William Joyce and James Joyce had their British passports in ...”

“... felt they had to wait until they were better off. Some went ahead anyway. John Scott – a future lord chancellor, but in 1772 a 21-year-old Oxford student with vague plans to pursue a career in the church or at the bar – had no money to speak of and few prospects, and wasn’t at all the kind of son-in-law his sweetheart Elizabeth’s father had ...”

“... a man of letters. He is all combined; and perhaps he is something more.’In​ the 1830s, as James Secord has shown, scientific literature had become hugely popular with the reading public. In fiction, it was an interregnum between the age of poets, such as Poe’s hero Lord Byron, and the full flourishing of the ...”

“... natural casting as a failure. He is a classic writer, in the old Esquire tradition, a lesser James Salter, and a dedicated ladies’ man. Specktor’s chapter on him turns into a synopsis for a screwball movie with its account of the filming of what became 92 in the Shade (1975).McGuane and his first wife, Becky, lived in glamorously wild places ...”

“... and significance of comet strikes on Earth’s development. In the 17th century, Descartes and James Hutton supported the idea of a steady-state system, or at least that the Earth goes through regular patterns of change such that its future state can be predicted, while others – such as Jean-André Deluc, who first introduced the term ...”

“... offered to send her any books she wanted, for a copy of Wild America by Roger Tory Peterson and James Fisher. An account of a 30,000-mile journey around the continent by two naturalists, it was originally published in 1955 and was being reissued in memory of Peterson, who had recently died. Fitzgerald wanted it, however, for the sake of his co-author, who ...”

“... who had hoped to take part in the climb, joined the search for the bodies. They never found Lord Francis Douglas. The chaplain decided to bury what there was of the other three in the snow and read over them the 90th Psalm, from a prayer-book found in the pocket of the dead divine, the Rev. Charles Hudson. Unsurprisingly, the Swiss authorities were ...”

“... standard edition of his prose writings, but we now have the full run in a distinguished edition by James Woolley. It is now possible, without visiting rare book libraries, to read the essays of both men in their original context, with their relation to one another in clear view. Sheridan’s (hopelessly inferior) essays help to throw light on Swift’s ...”

“... and Edward Fugion, did a thoroughly professional job in following the Irish revolutionary priest James O’Coigley and tracing his associates. In a delightfully libellous caricature by Isaac Cruikshank the runners were imagined not only as a formidable anti-radical force but as a force of nature. It shows Charles James Fox ...”