“... he wanted us, and wanted us to be happy!’); University, the Idea of the (‘The idea that there may be a ravishing beauty in simply knowing – or better still, finding out – that Dr Donne’s horti conclusi and fons signati are from the Song of Songs is about as acceptable now as pederasty’); Septum, the Nasal (‘For countless millennia, the humble ...”

“... was enjoying that temporary high the male feels when his muscles, no matter what size they may be, are gorged with blood. He feels … more of a man.’ This is it: the endless struggle for tumescence. Often, with Wolfe, the sheer butch outrageousness of the execution is a sort of pleasure in itself. In one of the few scenes from Charlotte Simmons that ...”

“... The Duke of Wellington may have defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, but it was English surgeons who finally cut the French emperor down to size. After his death on St Helena in May 1821, an autopsy was hastily arranged in order to quash claims that he had died from neglect ...”

“... Eugène Sigismondovitch Politovsky, author of From Libau to Tsushima, published after his death in May 1905. Dredging Politovsky up from history for a commission he received from the Ferens Art Gallery in Hull in 1983, Douglas Dunn has made him the narrator of his book-length poem The Donkey’s Ears. It’s been a long journey for Politovsky this time round ...”

“... has, as it were, tarnished the metal. Central banks are selling into extremely nervous markets. It may well be that in the words of a memorandum commissioned by Winston Churchill as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1925, gold reserves and a gold standard are ‘survivals of rudimentary and transitional stages in the evolution of finance and ...”

“... to meet these imperatives, and in The Gatekeeper the deprivations of family life in 1950s Salford may well have been tweaked to make an effective contrast with the fatuities of college life in 1960s Cambridge. They operate as contrastive elements in a moral fable where the gate separating one way of life from the other – to say nothing of the ways of ...”

“... than a fish-platter, and which defined the iconography of the Grail ever after. The shift may have been helped by phonetic ambiguities: the saint graal, ‘Sankgreall’ in Sir Thomas Malory’s spelling, the ‘holy vessel’, leached into the sang réal, ‘royal blood’. The Holy Grail was the vessel that had preserved the Holy ...”

“... by Miroslav Holub, whom he greatly admires, and who can sound like this in English: Inside there may be growing An abandoned room, Bare walls, pale squares where pictures hung, a disconnected phone, feathers settling on the floor the encyclopedists have moved out and Dostoevsky never found the place Lost in a landscape Where only surgeons Write poems – a ...”

“... The prime minister made it clear that except where Her Majesty’s Government may decide that supreme national interests are at stake, these British forces will be used for the purposes of international defence of the Western Alliance in all circumstances. Harold Macmillan, 21 December 1962 Harold Macmillan’s statement was made during a visit to the Bahamas to meet President Kennedy, hurriedly arranged after the US government cancelled the air-launched Skybolt missile, which it had promised to sell to the UK ...”

“... baselines’ around its Arctic islands. Under international law, straight baselines may be used to link the outer headlands of an archipelago or fragmented coastline. Provided the lines are of a reasonable length, the straits and channels within them are then subject to the full force of the coastal state’s domestic laws. Canada argues that ...”

“... between US and Soviet approaches to the Third World. Their economic and social policies may have been very different, but both sides shared a belief in universal models of progress. Both were obsessed with technology, and with ‘scientific’ solutions to social, economic, political and cultural problems. As Westad makes clear, the Soviet ...”

“... and ‘the queer little kingdom’ of Cushman’s theatrical world. Marcus notes that James may have drawn on Cushman’s menage, in heterosexual guise, for Charlotte Stant’s quasi-incestuous marriage to the father of her lover’s wife in The Golden Bowl. But she doesn’t mention James’s savage satire on female marriage in The Bostonians, or his ...”

“... pleasure of art, the pleasure of plot. But it is also an emblem of exile: ‘The season was May – mid-May, 1940,’ Nabokov writes. ‘The day before, after months of soliciting and cursing, the emetic of a bribe had been administered to the right rat at the right office and had resulted finally in a visa de sortie ...”

“... the courts can seek to mitigate law with justice. The legislative erosion of judicial discretion may play well with the media, but it comes at a price. What may, even then, be hard for judges to ignore is the noise of the journalistic echo-chamber which in this field sometimes passes for public opinion. For civil litigants ...”

“... Murrays, the firm was taken over by Hodder Headline (a component of the W.H. Smith empire) in May 2002, for £17m. Another gobbet for the conglomerate soup. The archive, which includes memorabilia such as Byron’s trophy collection of his lovers’ pubic hair, was retained as personal property by the Murray family, who have assured the NLS that any money ...”