“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The​ Pillow Book was written in Japan more than a thousand years ago. Little is known about its author, Sei Shonagon, save for what can be deduced from the text itself. In 993, when she was in her late twenties, she joined the court of Empress Teishi. During the Heian period (794-1186), ‘empress’ was a flexible term: Teishi was merely the first among a number of consorts with that title, each with her own entourage, each competing to find favour with the emperor and bear a future sovereign ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... although he travels further (geographically, at least) than Murray’s characters. Lord William Arthur Valerian Pommeroy is the hippy aristocrat who, in Nobuko Albery’s Absurd Courage, becomes so fascinated by Oriental thought that he founds a kind of guerrilla priesthood, the World Elsewhere. For him, emulation becomes immolation. Literally. A more ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... should let the new Caucasian republics ‘cut each other’s throats’. The foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, said he was ‘in favour of that’ so long as ‘Batum, Baku, the railway between them and the pipeline’ were protected.When Baku fell to the Red Army in 1920, Azerbaijan and its oilfields were subsumed into the Soviet Union. The vast resources ...”

“... ventriloquism of an octave.There was, of course, an unofficial Britten, one we choristers knew little about. This one was not the coaxer of communities but perhaps their opponent or dissident. He was the committed pacifist and conscientious objector, the creator of the Sinfonia da Requiem (1940),♪ commissioned and then rejected by the Japanese ...”