“... of your editor and referees, and when you answered the copy editor’s queries, and when you read the proofs. As you collect references across the span of your book, you are sure to find mistakes and inconsistencies. They are not only irritating: they provoke anxiety. Can they still be put right? It’s a race against the printer’s schedule. Yet if you ...”

“... into elegant but on the whole unoriginal digests. As the project progressed, and Montaigne read and wrote and relaxed into the therapy of writing, these five-finger exercises became something much greater. The later essays move beyond the simple juxtaposition of authorities, not only to wonder about the foundations of human knowledge, but to display a ...”

“... sketch reveals, existed as a collegium for the new humanism. More taught his children to read Greek and Latin by affixing letters to an archery-board and encouraging his pupils to fire arrows at them. The prosecutor of later years could bear to chastise his children only with a peacock-feather. He and his wife, Alice, played the lute together, like ...”

“... aimlessness. It does little to describe the poem. It gives even less idea of what it is like to read it, and not the slightest hint of why Browning should have written it in the first place. Perhaps the old fox had a point after all. We have to start again, and aim at another point of vantage. Two stories are bound up in The Ring and the Book. One is the ...”

“... There is a case for thinking that the crucial conversion was that of Edmund Burke’s father Richard, and that Burke grew up knowing that his father had publicly renounced as an ignoble superstition the Catholic religion which Edmund’s Nagle mother, and later his Nugent wife, continued to practise. O’Brien eloquently and convincingly argues that ...”

“... Dealer. The man who started this frivolous auction was William Safire, former speechwriter to Richard Nixon and now columnist for the New York Times. He it was who, during the dismal days of the Jimmy Carter Presidency, came up with ‘Koreagate’, ‘Peanutgate’, ‘Billygate’ and – his own favourite, concerning some fiddle of government expenses ...”

“... More drew on Sallust and Tacitus to compose his study of tyranny in The History of King Richard III. Shakespeare, inspired by More’s history, departed from it in loyally contrasting Richard with his virtuous Tudor successors. More’s praise of the first two Tudors could hardly have been more perfunctory. To ...”

“... down and going down, though there’s no doubt which one the audience prefers. 22 January. Take Richard Buckle’s autobiography, The Most Upsetting Woman, out of the London Library in order to refresh my memory of the Diaghilev exhibition in 1954. Buckle had organised it and put it on first at the Edinburgh Festival (a much smarter venue then than it is ...”

“... their work, which often came at a high cost to him. What must he have felt, apprehensively, as he read, in a letter from Dixon: ‘I sd be glad to have your opinion of a narrative poem in couplets, of the Byzantine times, that I have,’ and what must he have felt, even more apprehensively, when he received the manuscript – was it ‘The Story of ...”

“... I was in Los Angeles this spring on the day Richard Feynman died. The next morning I saw a banner lowered from the top of the tower block which stands in the middle of the Caltech campus. It read: ‘WE LOVE YOU DICK.’ The obituary of Feynman in the LA Times was awed and affectionate ...”

“... it, infiltrates the dreams of the man he has told about it, the surviving writer, and is finally read again by the Master’s mistress: Levi Matvei trails Jesus to the Cross, Jesus dies and Judas Iscariot is killed by the Romans in order to embarrass the Jews. The scene in which Pilate, haunted by his part in Jesus’s death, nevertheless coolly schemes to ...”

“... podium’, but he was prepared to give the Hitler salute. A long-standing friend of Gadamer’s, Richard Kroner, taught philosophy at Kiel. In 1934, Gadamer reports, ‘fate intervened to throw Kroner off track’: that is to say, Kroner was sacked because he was a Jew. Gadamer took his job. Despite this little success, further balancing acts were still ...”

“... Or even Samuel Johnson. If women’s writing were taken into account, would it change the way we read and judge the poetry of an era long assumed to be magisterially Augustan and masculine? In her passionate and wide-ranging study of 18th-century women’s poetry, Paula Backscheider quotes Isobel Armstrong’s framing of such questions in a suggestively ...”

“... vagrant punctuation, tmeses and promiscuously embracing parentheses’ resemble the texts he read as a Greek major at Harvard. The first passage here is by Sappho; the second by Cummings: [        ] Her[ Man[ And see[ms These girls al[l Topmost [ Wanders [ [            ] these [ [                ] Partner [ Own cousin ...”

“... in 1964. Suu Kyi’s student years are among the best documented and the most entertaining to read about. She represented a type which is forgotten in conventional reminiscence of the 1960s: passionate, idealistic, but determinedly and almost aggressively chaste in the face of new fashions in sexual liberation. Her college, St Hugh’s, was, in the words ...”