“... the full Yale treatment. ‘Almost’, because Brooke is a more abstemious editor than W.S. Lewis and the team responsible for the Yale edition of Walpole’s Correspondence: indeed, he makes the specific assumption that ‘the student of these volumes will have [that edition] readily available.’ Student, not reader, mark you: and we are told also ...”

“... But why does it follow that ateliers are the answer, or even an answer? ‘Both Pound and Wyndham Lewis were American or Americanised enough to have on the contrary a professional attitude to their respective arts, in the quite precise sense that they saw the continuity of art traditions ensured by the atelier, the master instructing his prentices. The ...”

“... the pressure-dependent thicks and thins of a pen-drawn line. Drypoints of night scenes by Martin Lewis exploit the uniquely dense blacks that etching can achieve. (In a number of them a dark ground was produced by first running the plate through the press with a sheet of sandpaper.) These are striking, if conventional, images that stand in a line you can ...”

“... forsakes him. In the first half of this century the best philosophers such as Russell, Moore, C.I. Lewis and Moritz Schlick accepted the theory of sense-data. It is only in the last thirty years that it has fallen out of fashion. This point, however, is not important for Van Fraassen’s argument. A more serious charge against him is that no clear line can be ...”

“... the early chapters of their autobiographies, Coleridge, Hardy, Yeats, Sassoon, Graves, Day Lewis, Spender and MacNeice have a good deal to say about the external circumstances of their family lives, but little about their internal or “writerly” lives.’ That is true, though some of these poets have left us evidence of their methods of ...”

“... trap one another in double entendres; Dante intricated fearsome and solemn symbolic enigmas, while Lewis Carroll poked gnomic fun at various targets in a rather more comic spirit. Riddling is a ‘trope of obfuscation’, Cook writes: ‘Doubly damned’. Her mission is twofold: first, to rehabilitate the riddle as a significant literary device, and second, to ...”

“... after the ‘rosi’ in ‘neurosis’. In David Jones in the Great War (2012), a superb study by Thomas Dilworth, we learn that Jones had seen more active service than any other war writer including Edmund Blunden, who’s normally credited with this debilitating honour. ‘Even with the time subtracted for convalescence and leave, he spent a total of 117 ...”

“... Modern American writers have taken to heart Thomas Wolfe’s warning that ‘you can’t go home again.’ These days, being American or being modern or both seems to demand recognition of exile. The writer has to say goodbye to his folks at the earliest opportunity. That is only the first stage in his education in the estrangements of our times ...”

“... the reformer Granville Sharp prosecuted a man named Stapylton who had taken his runaway slave, Thomas Lewis, forcibly on board ship. The trial judge, Lord Mansfield, tried to evade the moral issue by directing the jury that the case depended simply on whether Lewis was Stapylton’s property. The jury returned a ...”

“... reverse the cultural elision that existed in the long shadow of the Statute of Merton. The case of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings is exemplary but not singular. DNA evidence – blood – played a central role (an instance of the political instrumentality of genealogical methods) but it followed on a claim about the foundational principles that determined ...”

“... Saturday night and was killed. Mr Roberts, who was 69 years of age, was a brother of the late Mr Lewis Roberts, of Plershendre, Aberystwith, and both had been engaged for many years in the building trade in London. Mr Richard Roberts was an original member of the London County Council. The contents of his will made it into the Times, too, on 1 ...”

“... repeated fact about someone’s life is that a famous person was best man at their wedding. Dylan Thomas did the honours for Lynette Roberts and her groom in 1939, wearing a ‘smart brown suit’ he borrowed for the occasion. ‘I carried wild flowers and gave Dylan a bunchful of wild flowers for his lapel,’ Roberts recalled. ‘Vernon Watkins’s trousers ...”

“... make rather an unfair sort of comedy team. Not Hope-Crosby, nor Abbott-Costello, more like Martin-Lewis. As his initials suggest, F.X. is the son of a Roman Catholic mother and he is (by Tula Springs standards) almost as slick and Italianate as Dean Martin – ‘Hey, brothers, pour the wine!’ – while Bobby Pickens is as kack-handed and sincere as Jerry ...”

“... Lewis Carroll seems an obvious precursor of James Joyce in the world of elaborate wordplay, and critics have long thought so. Harry Levin suggested in 1941 that Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty was ‘the official guide’ to the vocabulary of Finnegans Wake. Why wouldn’t he be? He was the inventor of the portmanteau word (‘You see it’s like a portmanteau – there are two meanings packed up into one word’), an inspired parodist of what Saussure later called the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign (that is, its being grounded in nothing but convention) and extremely proud of his ability to ‘explain all the poems that ever were invented – and a good many that haven’t been invented just yet ...”

“... anyone any longer cared to try for this sort of thing. Lawrence Gowing, writing of a painting by Thomas Jones who was in Rome a century and a half earlier, explains: ‘The normal way of gathering information about nature is in a drawing, but this oil sketch is nothing like a drawing. It is based not on line but on solid colour matched in value and hue to ...”