“... keeper’ even conditioned their first appearance. In 1609, late in the dramatist’s career, a small volume called ‘SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS’ came into print, with a dedicatory page so curious that it has been used, from at least the earlier 19th century, to throw light on poems found obscure or simply not read for a hundred years or more before ...”

“... hard for little reward. The profits of their labour, and the taxes they pay, go to support a small number of lazy, arrogant rich people who live in big houses, wallow in luxury, and have no need to work. Any attempt to resist, let alone change, this unjust system is crushed by the weight of a vast private-public bureaucracy, encompassing the police, the ...”

“... some understanding of his health problems, such as they were. Some of the letters from Italy are small masterpieces of description; they are alert and sensitive and full of astute judgments. Sometimes, too, James is funny, irreverent and outspoken, especially in his letters to his family but also to literary friends from Newport and Boston such as Thomas ...”

“... famous, because the 7/7 bombers blew up a bus directly outside). The editorial office was one small book-and-paper-suffocated room, with four of us in it: Karl, Mary-Kay Wilmers, Susannah Clapp and me. Even that staffing level sounds more lavish than it was, because Karl split his time with his other job as Northcliffe Professor of Modern English ...”

“... dignified, easy-paced, pedagogic. He instructs, he remembers, he references: books on fire by Stephen Pyne of Phoenix, Arizona; a text called Primeval Forest by ‘a biology guy’ called Chris Maser; articles from the Nation on food stamps. Like many American poets inspired by open-field poetics – the monologues, essays and never-ending exchanges of ...”

“... strange seas of thought, alone’; Newton a young man and unwigged so that his head seems quite small and (appropriately) apple-like. We buy a luminous blue and white Victorian tile at Gabor Cossa which one of the partners thinks is William de Morgan but isn’t and then cross the road to the Fitzwilliam. I take in a chance selection of pictures, dictated ...”

“... Vladimir Stabnikov is waiting for us. I have met him before, in England and in the Soviet Union. Small, thick-set, black-eyed, densely-bearded, restlessly rubbing his hands, inexplicably powerful, grinning indefatigably, he wafts our party into the VIP lounge, where six or seven Africans are torpidly toying with glasses of Pepsi. After about ten minutes, all ...”

“... thousand dedicated ‘cooks’ in 19th-century England. Quite well-to-do households got by with small numbers of servants, often supplemented by the unpaid labour of the unmarried women in the family. The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine drew attention to this silent levy on the energies of ‘dependent’ female relatives. To the extent that their ...”

“... was published. The problems at the infirmary had become public largely through the efforts of Stephen Bolsin, a consultant anaesthetist with an interest in clinical audit, a process in which clinicians’ outcomes are measured. Bolsin became worried about the competence of these two surgeons to perform some of the more risky operations on ...”

“... Rossman that peasants and workers did not sit quietly and take whatever the regime dished out. Stephen Kotkin, on the other hand, was struck by how little resistance there was, and shows that Soviet citizens (like most people in most countries) simply accepted and accommodated to the prevailing system. Influenced by Foucault, he describes the Soviet people ...”

“... with tutorial concern for the young. There were dons who coached the boat, such as Leslie Stephen. There was a college such as King’s, for centuries an Etonian preserve, where the young fellows had known the undergraduates when they were both together in College at Eton and treated them therefore as equals; Bradshaw, a formidable scholar, was at ...”

“... behind an apparently impersonal language of moral disapproval and disdain. Thomas, who seemed small and effeminate, particularly beside his fierce brother William, was bound in early life to seek for love elsewhere: in a landscape, or in literature. It is, one might say, the old story. When the father died, his family became itinerant, shepherded by the ...”

“... of the technique of ‘close reading’, which is easily taught, and can be practised on a very small number of books. Williams has remarked that in his own criticism he found the method intoxicating but misleading, because it evaded structural problems and obscured questions of belief and ideology. Even more fundamental to the evolving discipline was its ...”

“... unmitigated by the humour and grudging respect that breaks out in Johnson on the Scots. Among the small would-be nations Byron also tried to help was Armenia, not mentioned in this book. After arriving in Venice in 1816, he provided money for an Armenian dictionary, and did some work on it himself. Is there a statue to him, or does some underground cell still ...”

“... Olympic games. Berlin in the Thirties, if you like. Two hundred million pounds of lottery money is small change when set against the conceptual brilliance, the dynamism, of this proposal. You can almost believe it. The site is buzzing, the great yellow struts on which the dome will be erected are lying on their sides. Piles are being power-driven deep into the ...”