“... had a knack of making you feel that the thing that might be done could only be done by you. ‘You may be so far ahead with Goldsmith that this book about Swift would not fit well,’ says the typewritten note in the last book he sent me, ‘but it might be mentioned. Goldsmith and Grub Street, then and now, does seem a subject in need of your ...”

“... or a warped reflection of the real, or a reflection of a reflection of the real; and all of it may or may not refer, however obliquely, to the world outside the novel, a world in which its author is an acclaimed creator of warped realities. It recalls all the conventions of the genre only to subvert them.The first and ...”

“... horizon, but the man is looking the other way and it doesn’t seem likely it will save him. Homer may have added it later to appease viewers who found the painting too bleak.The bottom third of the picture is taken up with a great wave, teeming with sharks. One swims towards us, its open mouth angled almost past the picture plane, while another appears to be ...”

“... of Hercules and his infant son Telephos. The Labourer stands in front of an enthroned figure who may be the goddess Arcadia, or, perhaps more plausibly, the Lydian queen Omphale, who enslaved Hercules for three years. Her right hand shows four digits: forefinger against her right temple, second finger against her cheek, third and fourth fingers bent ...”

“... to choose from. As we learn more about the microbiome and its contribution to health, it may come to be seen as an age of ...”

“... to be entered’, she said, a rich, immersive material.The Woven Child at the Hayward (until 15 May) is the first large-scale retrospective of Bourgeois’s textile works, made from the mid-1990s until her death in 2010. Her work with cloth is varied, prolific and innovative; many pieces offer new iterations of familiar Bourgeois themes ...”

“... to take the largest numbers of prisoners like proud participants in a Scottish shoot. Whatever may be thought of this explanation, we may be sure they did not intend that their prisoners should die in captivity. He misreads a document, moreover, by stating that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had urged that no further ...”

“... a member of the Royal Society and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Andrei Sinyavsky may dismiss his ideas as ‘ridiculous’ and suggest that he has no significance except as a stalking-horse for the ideas of Solzhenitsyn, but the excitement generated by his musings on Russian society, and especially by his essay ‘Russophobia’ which ...”

“... the dark, with nobody to show it you, smelling of onions and gutters.’ Some readers of this book may feel that Lady Granville’s own conversation was ‘all upon dress, the Opera, Talma’. These letters were written during the Napoleonic Wars and the Industrial Revolution, but poverty, crime and social injustice simply did not impinge on her ...”

“... Lady Astor’s son David was his friend. Besides, Chamberlain was in power: however strongly Trott may have deplored his stance, the Prime Minister was the man he had to influence. The third reason is this: in order to be able to travel and fulfil his mission, Trott had to remain on good terms with the German Government and its embassies and consulates in the ...”

“... Rousseau’s Confessions with its stirring opening – ‘I am like no one else in the world. I may be no better, but at least I am different’ – modern autobiography, as a literary form has set itself the aim of recording, not so much a person who has lived through unique events, as a unique person. It is reasonable to ask, therefore, whether this ...”

“... to the miracles’ which even Shakespeare could work with so barbaric an old play. This answer may seem plausible enough (although unverifiable, without the old Hamlet): but it ignores the sophistication of the revenge play tradition (as traced in Gordon Braden’s Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition), to say nothing of its symbolic relation to ...”

“... of Turkey. The border between Turkey and Armenia has been silent for 68 years; such a span of time may induce local forgetfulness. Groups of Armenians from the worldwide diaspora are visiting Erevan all the time, and I was lucky to make friends at the hotel with a group from Damascus: they appeared to be owners of factories in Syria, or large ...”

“... A Comedy’, which is (presumably) motivated by anger about current attitudes towards the NHS. I may be missing a very clever point, but the mixture of glibness and cunning with which Williams forges his rhymes seems closer to the methods of those who would destroy rather than defend the Health Service. For instance, when a lecherous consultant is made to ...”

“... Oxford, and ends with his valedictory in 1989 – all writings firmly historiographical. But one may easily detect the influence of his engagement in the contemporary war/peace debates in Howard’s treatment of the past: he writes of the decisions of 1914 or 1939 as the disabused observer of current policy-making, and with a sense of urgency that reflects ...”