“... bestseller with staying power. ‘Curious to think that a slender little volume about lunacy may provide a meal ticket for my superannuated years,’ Styron muses in Selected Letters, edited by his widow with R. Blakeslee Gilpin. The irony of Styron’s career is that as a literary son of Faulkner, Wolfe and Hemingway, he expended massive energy and ...”

“... made-up. Anyone who finds his poems flat or prosaic might consider Edward Thomas’s defence of Robert Frost: ‘if his work were printed [as prose] it would have little in common with the kind of prose that runs to blank verse ... It is poetry because it is better than prose.’ A New Path to the Waterfall is poetry because it is better than prose. Another ...”

“... of this particular technique: ‘Sheet-lightning split the sky over London on the evening of 12 May 1907 and thunder rumbled long into the night. All day it had been sultry, the trees in Regent’s Park barely moving and a heat haze obscuring the new growth of leaves.’ There is almost a Bethlehem feel about this: a new light in the sky and various ...”

“... the fear that the country is winding down and losing its competitive vigour, and the fear that it may fall apart. This tension has, if anything, become more acute. In the Democratic Party contest between Hart and Mondale we saw a growing concern among party supporters that the two candidates’ attacks on each other were ‘tearing apart the party’. Yet, as ...”

“... it is, the less certain the outcome. The accuser can end up all but in the dock; the accused may walk away from a true bill. Churchill, well aware of this, wanted the Nazi leaders, when they were finally captured, to be taken out and shot. Roosevelt initially agreed. It was Stalin, who had found that trials could be exceedingly satisfactory in both ...”

“... and close relationships with senior figures in the Elizabethan regime, such as William Cecil and Robert Dudley. His activities abroad were instrumental in his appointment as principal secretary to the queen in 1573, which marked the beginning of nearly two decades of virtually uninterrupted activity at the heart of government. Cooper’s portrait necessarily ...”

“... a brief postscript to one of the chapters and a few remarks in the preface, George Akerlof and Robert Shiller’s Animal Spirits was written before the current crisis. Yet, based on research undertaken over many years, it can be read as prefiguring the current disillusionment with economics. The trouble with prevailing theories, in Akerlof and Shiller’s ...”

“... the colours, respectively, of the Orders of the Garter, Bath and Thistle – coveted prizes in Robert Walpole’s repertoire of patronage and sleaze.This didn’t deter the hack who blustered that Swift’s intention ‘could be no other than to ridicule our three most noble Orders’, abuse of which by kings or ministers, he added, could never happen ...”

“... official line in Havana is that when the incumbent’s current five-year term is up, in 1998, he may pass his official duties on to younger successors. He would then have ruled Cuba for forty years, retiring at the age of 71. (Joaquín Balaguer, in the adjoining Dominican Republic, though blind, was last year re-elected President for the sixth time, at the ...”

“... by Reeve as corrupt in more than a thousand places. Its joint dedication to King Stephen and Robert of Gloucester, which Faletra regards as ‘savvy marketing’ by Geoffrey, is likewise dismissed as a ‘clumsy adjustment’ of the original one, to Robert and Count Waleran of Meulan. Faletra might well feel sore that ...”

“... and rhythms of the printers’ working lives. In the wake of brilliant studies by McKenzie, Robert Darnton and others, McKitterick reconstructs the economics of book production: the costs of type, copper plates and paper, the sizes of editions, the prices per sheet of the resulting books (slightly lower than London ones). Moving from the warehouse to ...”

“... they suspected he would dearly like to hear: moreover, as Mendel was an abbé, his assistants may have felt that there was an element of heresy in securing results other than those the Reverend Father was convinced were true. This is a subject on which the authors of the present book write amusingly. I do not suppose that personal advancement is a ...”

“... rebuff of all – at least in this capacity. I mean, of course, Thomas Jefferson. On 9 May 1825, Jefferson wrote to Henry Lee about the Declaration that ‘neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind and to give that ...”

“... of Keynes’s birth in 1883 has come and gone. Last year saw the opportune publication of Robert Skidelsky’s much-heralded new biography – or at least of its first volume, which does not get further than 1920. It is a formidable work, designed to out-Harrod Harrod, which will be an unparalleled source for those interested in the rise of the junior ...”

“... Street Station. This terseness could be seen as a mark of embarrassment and I wonder if Feinstein may have felt inhibited by certain pieties. There seems a kind of nihil nisi bonum at work in the novel. Neither family contains a character who is at all sternly dealt with. Cruelty is recorded – old Solomon’s leaving his one faithful child out of his ...”