“... both of broad issue and of instructive detail, in this volume than I can possibly indicate in a short review. The separate chapters, on topics as diverse as ‘The Development of Commercial Science Journals in Victorian Britain’ or ‘The Changing Appearance of Research Journals in Science and Technology’, will take their place as distinctive ...”

“... with whom he never came to a lasting understanding was Montfort (yet another brother-in-law).In short, nothing could be less like the conventional idea of a pugnacious Plantagenet than the fair nine-year-old child who came to the throne in 1216, already weeping, in circumstances that would have taxed a Churchill or a Napoleon. Henry laboured all through his ...”

“... poems appeared he appalled friends by marrying Jane, the daughter of a stable keeper, and then got Philip Webb to build the Red House for his family just south of London. Although once canonised as the first modernist dwelling on account of its simple layout and truth to materials, Morris described it as ‘very medieval in spirit’. Perhaps too ...”

“... the same time’. Yourcenar’s career had begun.There is a picture of Yourcenar from 1936, hair short, expression neutral and collar turned up. Her eyes are still, her eyebrows bushy; her lips are held together but the bottom one is plump, available. She had started to throw her heart around a bit: she had an affair with a married mother called Lucy ...”

“... think I am temperamentally a mystic, he says. He believes Wordsworth and Blake and George Fox and Philip K. Dick. But he excludes from the dimension of greater meaning the ascetic practices of the modern day. We engage in them, certainly: ‘hot yoga, ceaseless meditation, extreme fasting, various forms of detox, excessive exercise and compulsive devotion to ...”

“... loyal support of the Crown during the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, and they engaged the lawyer Philip Carteret Webb. The Jewish Naturalisation Act (the ‘Jew Bill’) was finally passed in May 1753, but during the general election of the following year it became a focus for City, High Church and Tory opposition. ‘Here, for the first time in English ...”

“... the hero travels to Hades to find that death has undone all the pointless hierarchies of life: Philip of Macedon is stitching rotten sandals to earn money, Xerxes is begging, and so on. But the point is made clear earlier on, when Menippus tells us that, on earth, things have become sadly inverted: ‘On observation I found these same people practising the ...”

“... with the attempted secession of eastern Nigeria. Food assistance undoubtedly saves lives in the short run, but in the longer term it is just as likely to prolong hostilities by becoming entangled with the war economy. ‘Most thoughtful relief workers see humanitarian action as a neutral stop-gap,’ de Waal writes, but ‘for the victims of famine, it can ...”

“... from his collected works, however unflattering a light it casts on him. What is going on? A short extract from Advertisements for Myself explains the method in this madness: ‘I have been running for American President these last ten years in the privacy of my mind,’ the author says in a rare first-person appearance. ‘The sour truth is that I am ...”

“... Mind first came out, Robert Paul Wolff, then a professor of philosophy at Amherst, wrote a short review in Academe, the journal of the American Association of University Professors. Let me quote from his prescient opening staves: Aficionados of the modern American novel have learned to look to Philip Roth for ...”

“... in the future, he survived well enough on a small private income and some reviewing. He was not short of friends, including some as grand as T.S. Eliot, who admired Empson as well as finding him funny (‘dirtier and more distrait than ever … most refreshing to see him’). But the war was coming on; myopia left him unfit for military service, and ...”

“... Oddingley Grange on Trench Lane, whose châtelaine was a Mrs White, aunt of Lieutenant-Colonel Philip Robinson, commanding officer of the Royal Artillery 67th Field Regiment, Territorial Army. Lt Col Robinson approved, and a gruff handshake transformed my father into a second lieutenant, though he had to serve his time as a failed schoolteacher until June ...”

“... is it he’s less well thought of than, say, twenty years ago. Because he’s not long dead is the short answer and also, I suppose, because the literary scene has changed, with no one critic presiding in the way Connolly and (to a lesser extent) Raymond Mortimer did. The only time I met Connolly was in 1968 – when my first play, Forty Years On, was in ...”

“... in McGahern’s early novels – The Barracks (1963), The Dark (1965) – and in some of his best short stories. ‘Gugering,’ Frank Shovlin explains in a footnote, ‘is the act of dropping seed potatoes into holes in the ground.’ Uncle Pat, he suggests, is a model for the fictional character ‘The Shah’ in McGahern’s final novel, That They Might ...”

“... band in 1932, nonetheless appeared in minstrel blackface in the same year’s musical short, Dream House. It went with the territory. Henderson’s saxophone and brass subsequently double the tempo in the recording, as though they’re trying to dash away from the compromising lyrics. They can’t, notwithstanding a lovely, full-bodied concluding ...”