“... in the poet’s breath has communicated itself to the painter’s brush, which rushes at the five-foot width of the canvas in a wild rolling scumble – here hitting deep bronze-russets, there scudding patina-green moonshine – performing a kind of love dance around the dreaming female. (Cold must have quickened the pace too. Following Millais’s customary ...”

“... his girlfriend’s thigh’) into tense alignment with the musicians, who ‘keep holding on// a foot off the ground,/but holding’. Yet how long, the poem also asks, can this ‘rope of cries’ take the strain? the bass and drums are about to fly off the beat and lose the soloist orbiting round it but don’t, somehow For the Beats, in their ...”

“... tragedy. Denied the dignity of his tragic heroism, the noble Hamlet is a destructive force. In John Updike’s recent novel Gertrude and Claudius, Hamlet is still more unlovable. He is coldly manipulative, while his kingly father is reduced to a clumsy and egotistical bully. Updike is also engaged in an act of rehabilitation. But he turns his attention to ...”

“... and friendly, ‘a tough old Clydeside revolutionary’ and a war hero with a partly wooden foot and a special medal, who had educated himself into ‘a passionate interest in literature’. When the end came she was desperately sorry to be leaving him. Of the younger men coming to the fore, John Gollan, Pollitt’s ...”

“... the country in search of old records that a handful of them – Skip James, Son House, Mississippi John Hurt – were ‘rediscovered’. They became draws on the coffee-house and festival circuit, while recordings by John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, who had made their names playing house-rocking, amplified ...”

“... a hundred years before Parliament paid out about five times that amount to the ‘lone genius’ John Harrison in 1773 for the magnificent marine chronometer that provided a working solution to the longitude problem. The patent Hooke wanted was a type of ‘Letters Patent’ – literally ‘open letters’, sealed but not sealed up, conferring the special ...”

“... has eluded them, and its subject is one of the four or five people who stick in my gullet. John Traill Christie was my headmaster for just over four years. I never knew him well, though I have had to think about him a lot. For a brief period I must have occupied his thoughts because he spent about a term and a half, which coincided with some of ...”

“... It has become the party of wars and jails, and its moral physiognomy is captured by the faces of John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, faces hard to match outside Cruikshank’s drawings of Dickens’s villains, hard as nails and mean as dirt and with an issue still up their sleeve when wars wind down and the jails are full: a sworn hostility towards immigrants ...”

“... Bower of Flora, a House of Night and Diana’s Tree of Chastity, in front of which danced nine 15-foot golden trees. At the end of the dance, each tree opened to reveal a masquer, richly clad in the costume of a ‘wodewose’, or wild man. Early modern playhouses like the Globe could manage nothing on this scale; yet the anonymous Sir Clyomon and Sir ...”

“... I am on the right track, but it is clearly possible that the extremely expert Debbie read the two-foot thick manuscript of her husband’s book and decided that it was so boring it wouldn’t sell. And in this context, you have to appreciate that ‘unsaleability’ has nothing to do with sales in Waterstone’s or W. H. Smith’s: the real money is made for ...”

“... movements in Iran, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia? Why is Kelly, who appears never to have set foot there, so confident that the rural population of South Yemen is sunk in religious fanaticism? If they were as aimlessly pious as Kelly implies, one can only wonder why so many tens of thousands of rural Yemenis have left their villages to find jobs all over ...”

“... placed in the Fellows’ Garden at Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he is commemorated beside John Milton. There is occasion to take a look at them, nonetheless, for we now have this account of the man by his brother, Philip Snow. ‘Brothers seldom write about each other,’ as the publisher says, and one may think that in general they are wise not to do ...”

“... humanist Enlightenment: through Paley, Priestley, Price, Wedgwood, Erasmus Darwin. But stick your foot, or your library ticket, into the sea of pamphlets and sermons of Dissent and of Methodist break-aways, and you are back in a tradition descending from 17th-century Anabaptists and Ranters, of Ezra and Isaiah, of ...”

“... local surgeon. At 21 he moved to London to continue his medical studies as anatomical assistant to John Hunter at St George’s Hospital. Although Jenner returned to his Berkeley medical practice in 1773, Hunter had recognised Jenner’s scientific prowess and encouraged him in his research. ‘Why think – why not try the experiment,’ he wrote in ...”

“... had forgotten the leash but it didn’t matter. We weren’t going to catch anything. She was five foot nine, and thin, and often ill, and easily tired. But none of that mattered either. It was all in the timing. Normally you’d be in the river wading, but to start with, the bank is fine. She paid out her line into the water, letting the current take the fly ...”