“... and limitations of the new biology. The book has its scientific antecedents, most specifically Richard Lewontin’s The Doctrine of DNA and Stephen Jay Gould’s Wonderful Life; yet it stands alone in trying to reach to the very essence of biology, with its ‘knowable pasts and unknowable futures’, in the best tradition of Italy’s two scientific ...”

“... or dismissive, so some venerable commentators – the late Lawrence Gowing, Michael Levey, Richard Wollheim, Marina Warner and, singled out for a special treatment, Charles Hope – are, in this new edition, keenly reprehended. It should be said that Steinberg, a lively and resourceful writer, could not with any justice be charged with irreverence or ...”

“... of the external letters which the editor includes. It was written by his wife Catherine to Richard Hengist Horne, a rather rackety literary man, author of the forgotten epic ‘Orion’, who had been a friend of the young Meredith; and it describes, with that striking domestic vividness of which even the most commonplace Victorians seem to have been ...”

“... for the Venice Biennale on the forged metal sculptures of Chadwick, Armitage and Butler, Herbert Read wrote that they displayed the ‘geometry of fear’ and found allusions to snares, teeth and claws. In the wake of the atom bomb and revelations about the concentration camps, Read’s description helped to determine an ...”

“... was not only the great Victorian urban epitome but was also the place that people now want most to read about. On Leicester, where he spent the whole of his academic career, he published not a line, though he was active locally as a conservationist. The structure of British historiography, when Dyos began his academic career in 1952, had scarcely begun the ...”

“... There may be some 20th-century art which would help us to understand Reni’s paintings. Richard Spear illustrates and discusses popular devotional aids which derive ultimately from Reni’s example, and it might also be revealing to examine the devices of glamour, star and society photographs. In any case, it is undeniable that Reni’s priorities ...”

“... were still cheering contrasts between the old and new regimes. The leftish Australian writer, Richard Neville, was quoted with approval: ‘There is perhaps an inch of difference between an Australia governed by Labour and an Australia governed by the right, but, believe me, it is an inch worth living in.’ Or as Charlie Whelan, Gordon Brown’s spin ...”

“... to lead public opinion – rather like Bill Clinton. Although conceived before 11 September, both Richard Carwardine and Daniel Farber’s books have at least one eye on the present. Carwardine focuses on Lincoln’s relationship to different kinds of power – political, military and moral, and the power of public opinion and religious enthusiasm in an ...”

“... In the closing stages of Richard Ben Cramer’s biography of Joe DiMaggio there is an exchange between the baseball legend and a man called Cappy Harada for whom DiMaggio had done a bit of business. The episode is undated in the book, but took place some time before the San Francisco earthquake of 1989, at which time DiMaggio was 74 ...”

“... Johnson visited Pembroke College, Oxford and called on the master, William Adams. According to Richard Sher, Boswell wrote in his journal how dismayed he had been to see in the master’s library a copy of the quarto edition of David Hume’s Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects of 1758, handsomely bound in morocco leather. Boswell believed, Sher ...”

“... undergraduates drops by to goad this ‘perfectly splendid old Tory’ (‘I mean, have you even read Rousseau’s Le Contrat social?’), the reader is manipulated into agreeing with their arguments while finding the students intensely annoying. It’s as though Edward is some demented great-uncle, deserving of much mockery and even dangerous in some ...”

“... her own story. She enjoyed only the romances of Barbara Cartland. I’m far too snobbish to have read one, but I assume they are stories in which a wedding takes place and they all live happily ever after. Diana didn’t see the possible twists in the narrative. What does Kate read? It’s a question. Kate seems to have ...”

“... forth. Some mesmeric staying power is obviously involved. In my adolescence, he was an obligatory read. I can still see the mid-1970s Penguin collection I carried around like a talisman: parallel English and French texts, the cover Carlos Schwabe’s painting Spleen et Idéal. OK, I confess: I fell hard for the Baudelaire mythos, while never quite getting the ...”

“... Appropriating Shakespeare at just as many points, but it isn’t a book I am planning to re-read in the immediate future, if ever. In most important respects Vickers is engaged in the same project as Foakes – the defence of the aesthetic and the author against the perceived excesses of post-structuralist criticism – but he adopts a procedure almost ...”

“... sitting in a single armchair together, and falling over backwards, but we are plainly invited to read in it some kind of epitaph. ‘My humour was gravity,’ the speaker says in this poem (‘Ancient Evenings’); but when you get too grave you end up on the floor. Of another relationship, the poet says with rueful delicacy: ‘We failed to betray ...”