“... is better, in large part because her mind has continued to change, and so has her life. A short but expansive piece illustrative in miniature of the book’s wide-ranging interests moves from a postcard reproduction of Balthasar Denner’s 1721 painting Alte Frau to a touching remembrance of the late John Berger to a dual meditation on ageing ...”

“... makes him – so fatigued, thin-skinned and full of teenage chagrin – come alive on the page. Philip Larkin once described Sue in Jude the Obscure as ‘too irritating not to have been a real person’. (You see what he means: ‘I couldn’t bear to let you go – possibly to Arabella again – and so I got to love you, Jude.’) Nikolai’s jibes at his ...”

“... different visual effect of the original is illustrated in David Norton’s The King James Bible: A Short History from Tyndale to Today, as well as in Campbell’s own Bible, another history of the KJB). It’s a pity, but the change emphasises just how remote the modern ‘King James’ Bible is from its original. It doesn’t look the same, it isn’t spelled ...”

“... elder’s decline. The succession was once again secure. In 1947, when Princess Elizabeth married Philip of Greece, who is, like her, a great-great-grandchild of Victoria, it put yet another set of cousins, the Mountbattens, into position to steer the monarchy into the next reign. There were expeditions to Germany after the war by British agents, including ...”

“... bloggers clamoured to interview and in some cases canonise her. Heti has been called the heir to Philip Roth, or to Joan Didion, and the literary equivalent of the filmmaker Lena Dunham or the songwriter Frank Ocean, who astonished the luridly heterosexual R’n’B scene last year by recording love songs addressed to his boyfriend. But what if she’d just ...”

“... Literary History (2004) seemed to rate Prynne’s work above that of the ‘national monument’ Philip Larkin, John Carey reliably set up the easy symbolic row in the Sunday Times; the other papers, and the Today programme, pitched in predictably. Yet the result, interestingly and perversely, was to establish Prynne as the most significant alternative to ...”

“... included her aunt, Sarah Siddons, her father, Charles, and her uncle, the great tragedian John Philip Kemble, Fanny herself was deeply ambivalent towards the theatre. She first aspired to be a writer rather than an actress; and it was only when the family faced bankruptcy that the latest Kemble was swiftly prepared for the stage. As the manager and ...”

“... a steady income for himself and his heirs. He was never above suing: in 1604 he took his neighbour Philip Rogers to court for a debt of 35 shillings and ten pence. When a group of local notables sought late in his life to enclose common land near Stratford, he prudently did not interfere, once he had satisfied himself that his income from tithes was safe. The ...”

“... thinks that the log-normal distribution applies strictly: they are all aware that, at least over short periods of time, the distributions of price changes are fat-tailed, with extreme events happening with relatively high frequency. The canonical model can be elaborated to cope with this, for example by allowing the volatility of prices to change with ...”

“... up of the trust of two of her grand-daughters, one of whom was married to Thomas Wharton, son of Philip, Baron Wharton, the Nonconformists’ champion in the House of Lords and John Owen’s patron. Her son, the poet Rochester, was a supporter of Buckingham, was listed by Shaftesbury as ‘worthy’, and despite repeated bouts of severe illness served on the ...”

“... proceedings were instituted against him in 1786 (murmurings against him had begun earlier); Philip Francis, the author of the satirical letters of ‘Junius’, was to be his nemesis. Francis had served alongside Hastings in India, and it is clear that he had quickly become jealous of the man and his authority (Bernstein makes no secret of his dislike ...”

“... are also taken into account – a supplement to Francis Godwin’s Catalogue of Bishops, the short relation of his time in Ireland (which he wrote as part of an audacious but failed attempt to be made Chancellor of Ireland and Archbishop of Dublin in 1605), his translation of the School of Salerne (a popular medieval versified medical treatise), his ...”

“... as if they were real, and it is hard not to be grateful when the real personality goes even a short way towards matching up with the fictional one. Carole Lombard was a scatological delight in real life. Clark Gable adored her foul tongue, and when we dote on one of her studio portraits and imagine that lush mouth saying a dirty word we would need to be ...”

“... story of six days in the life of a rather self-important, busy young man who has granted himself a short sabbatical. Quite a few years have passed, he says, since he decided to take this meditative mini-break, and now at last he has cleared a whole week to spend in an isolated house with only his thoughts and memories for company. He is planning to retrace the ...”

“... effectively end their study with South Africa’s exit from the Commonwealth, adding only a short epilogue to bring the story up to its 1994 re-entry. Their frontispiece shows Nelson Mandela on his 2001 visit to Hyam’s Cambridge college, when he talked happily of the ‘unbreakable bonds’ between the two countries. While they certainly show that a ...”