“... from his verse, both excellent – Michael Hofmann’s for the NYRB Poets series and Matthew Francis’s New Selected Poems for Faber – the early work doesn’t get much of a showing, even though Graham retained a soft spot for it and made sure these poems were represented in the original Collected Poems that appeared towards the end of his life. ‘To ...”

“... 4. Correlation. This is the fundamental engine of the social sciences. It began around 1870, when Francis Galton devised the correlation coefficient. Quetelet had the mean, but Galton made deviation from the mean the core of his social philosophy, and so devised the correlation coefficient. We try to correlate autism with everything, not excluding the ...”

“... for what is now called ‘gentrification’, but which was then called ‘knocking through’. Young professional couples, many of them in journalism or television, bought up the houses, converted them and (an invariable feature of such conversions) knocked the basement rooms together to form a large kitchen-dining-room. In the mid-Sixties I wrote a BBC TV ...”

“... near a little village of Peru, and made a voyage to England in an ingot, under the convoy of Sir Francis Drake’; the shilling’s later adventures include being exchanged for a shoulder of mutton, and getting clipped by a counterfeiter. The 18th century witnessed a mania for ‘it-narratives’, tales told from the perspective of money, corkscrews, lapdogs ...”

“... see now because they don’t work here.’ The next morning as T. gets ready for work again, his young son might tell him: ‘No Daddy – no work. Work’s closed. No. Work’s closed.’ T. earns £10.90 an hour, which brings him a salary of £22,105 a year without overtime, a figure above the UK living wage of close to £16,000 but below the median wage ...”

“... you go back to the hotel?’); sexual longing, confusion and mad passions; teenage marriage, young motherhood, and a Doll’s House bolt; soaring ambition accompanied by wracking self-doubt; an arduous climb to the top that left her competitors littered on the slopes; mortal illness, and near miraculous recovery; heroism, heartache, more heroism and more ...”

“... in ticket sales, the largest US gross that year. Still, there was a vague sense that frisky young Prince – the latest reincarnation of the R’n’B acts the Stones venerated and in some sense owed their existence to – was being used as a heart-starter, to angry up the old (thirtysomething) troupers’ blood. As Jason Draper puts it in Prince: Life ...”

“... one looking straight at us. The most powerful figure is that of the mother, standing behind her young daughters, staring out of shot to our right with a brooding imperiousness. But the d’Orsay show also has many preliminary drawings for the painting, of which the fullest, dated c.1858-59, has the mother looking full-face towards us. Redirecting her ...”

“... tests had been done on the fragment.Further problems arose in the interim. A British scholar, Francis Watson, noticed that all but one of the phrases in the fragment appeared to have been borrowed from the Coptic Gospel of St Thomas, the exception being that showstopper: ‘my wife’. In itself this proved nothing, and in fact the sixth line also ...”

“... were subject to the same evolutionary laws, why not do this with them? Darwin’s half-cousin Francis Galton had created something of a splash in 1869 with his Hereditary Genius, purporting to correlate high achievement with particular bloodlines. In work by others inspired by Galton’s example, the easily transmitted cultural advantages of a social ...”

“... how many doesn’t matter) dissolve into ‘billet-doux’, texts so much more sacred to a young woman in the age of Queen Anne than all those dreary epistles from the apostles – and the word ‘Bibles’ virtually has a tag hovering above it which says ‘Smile at the incongruity here.’ You do as you’re told of course, and smile. But a laugh ...”

“... of which H. sap can conceive remain unfulfilled,’ but Reading is more like Betjeman than Francis Bacon, and he convinces you that he is neither subconsciously attracted to the degradations he describes nor writing from the standpoint of ‘beetrooty colonels’ who want ‘to get this Great Country back on its feet’. A difficult balancing act, but ...”

“... He was far beyond being influenced by his affections, and in writing as he did to the beautiful young novelist he was not for a moment influenced by the fact that he fancied her. Godwin was justified in writing these reproofs in part by his exceptionally clear-sighted and rational judgment of character, evident especially perhaps in his estimate of ...”

“... After he died, in 1592, posthumous editions of the Essays were prepared by Marie de Gournay, a young intellectual and admirer of Montaigne’s who became his literary executor. Philippe Desan’s biography aims to debunk the familiar picture of Montaigne as an aristocratic sage in retirement. ‘The literary and philosophical constitution of the ...”

“... stopped in Egypt to see the sights and was observed to gaze for a long time at the Sphinx: ‘Francis Worsley commented that she probably couldn’t make head nor tail of him.’ MacNeice’s problem, in the words of his BBC colleague Jack Dillon, was that he was an introvert trying to be an extrovert. He badly needed to feel he belonged to a group, and ...”