“... to keep the philosophy of nature aimed at the moving targets of contemporary physical theory. It took us a generation to swallow the relativity of time: we can wait a bit longer, until we are sure we have understood what happened in the Big Bang, before we rejig our traditional notions of eternity. Nevertheless, something vital is missing from the particular ...”

“... ten months of 1997. During the mid-October meltdown, when the other ‘techs’ quoted on NASDAQ took a terrible beating, Amazon.com stock (AMZN) held firm. Investors have faith in it. On the other hand, and rather worryingly, Amazon.com is still not in profit. Nor is it clear when it will be. Bezos used to hazard late 1998. But asked by CNN a few weeks ...”

“... once been “Chettwynde”, which meant “the winding path” in Anglo-Saxon; and the suggestion took root in my head that poetry, my name and the road were, all three, mysteriously connected.’ Writing about travel and distant places often gains its force from the mixture of motives on the part of the traveller, the blend of self-extinction and ...”

“... that mentioned revolt or longing for a lost fatherland (such as Bellini’s Norma): but they took place in 1847-48, just ahead of the 1848 revolutions, not in 1842-43. So far was Verdi in those earlier years from chafing under the ‘Austrian yoke’ that he dedicated the scores of Nabucco and I Lombardi to two Austrian archduchesses in turn, one of them ...”

“... their deaths were worse than others. American news media, he remarks sardonically, only sat up and took notice when the disease started to strike the people who mattered – heterosexuals. But in fact the American news media had been ignoring large numbers of heterosexuals affected by Aids. It was just that these heterosexuals happened to be Africans, not ...”

“... of distracting teaching and administrative chores? Again, the Provost of University College London took a lead by circulating to his heads of department a letter instructing that colleagues who had not been helpful in the 1992 exercise might be given more teaching, reassigned to such tasks as fire officer and, in incorrigible cases, have it hinted to them that ...”

“... nurses and auxiliaries, scanning his patient details, would cheerily address him as ‘John’.) He was already using the name that was to become so familiar, the byline that launched a thousand pieces. Was he already that ‘Frank Kermode’, that effortlessly elegant, perceptive, slyly amusing, wide-ranging critic? Not really, not to judge by ...”

“... up to regard the Washington political stage as his natural domain – his great-grandfather John Adams was the first president to live in the White House; his grandfather was John Quincy Adams – and he could never keep away from the city and its gossip for long. But his early political heroes soon revealed feet of ...”

“... the Oxford English Dictionary’s hundred most frequently cited authorities (one spot ahead of John Donne) for the earliest evidence of a word. He probably got this one from the German; it doesn’t seem to show up in French until 1820. Soon autobiography was everywhere, and not in a good way. Or so it seemed to the editors of the Quarterly Review, who, as ...”

“... a head early in 1982 when both the Deputy Editor, Charles Douglas-Home, and the Managing Editor, John Grant, tendered their resignations. The Chairman refused to accept them, and instead asked Evans for his resignation and appointed Douglas-Home to succeed him. After a few days of disorder on the editorial floor, when Evans declared that he was not resigning ...”

“... and rational tragic form, and indeed what constitutes the tragic situation’. The play – Empson took it as that, not as the ‘charade’ Auden called it – had ‘the sort of completeness that makes a work seem to define the attitude of a generation’. This notion, that Auden was in straightforward possession of all the available forms of knowledge and ...”

“... a jolly television games-player (yes, Arthur Marshall); another, who served in Intelligence, took to wearing bangles and a large diamond in one ear, and was barred from Wimbledon for designing too-saucy dresses for tennis women (Teddy Tinling); a third, who rose from private in the Honourable Artillery Company, was a devout Christian who launched the ...”

“... John Lewis​ was at the heart of the protests in the early 1960s which transformed race relations in the United States. He participated in the sit-ins of 1960 in which black students (and a few white allies) occupied seats in shops, restaurants and entertainment venues from which African Americans were barred. In 1961 he joined the freedom rides, in which black and white activists travelled together on buses in the South to test whether local officials would follow new national rules prohibiting states from separating passengers on the basis of race ...”

“... were returning my stare! They belonged to a strangely compelling creature which … immediately took possession of me. This was my introduction to the work of Hirshfield.’The strangely compelling creature was Angora Cat, one of only two paintings Morris Hirshfield had begun before 1939. He was 67. In the seven years before his death in 1946, he painted ...”

“... that J.G.A. Pocock told him that Conrad Russell told him that Bertrand Russell told him that Lord John Russell told him that his father the sixth Duke of Bedford told him that he had heard William Pitt the Younger speak in Parliament during the Napoleonic Wars, and that Pitt had this curious way of talking, a particular mannerism that the sixth Duke of ...”