“... to whom the book was dedicated: ‘I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb ... Lord, when shall we be done growing? As long as we have anything more to do, we have done nothing. So, now, let us add Moby Dick to our blessing, and step from that. Leviathan is not the biggest fish; – I have heard of Krakens’ (a fabulous ...”

“... and motor-flights: a manner of life portrayed as a violent contrast with the eremitic existence of Lamb House, James’s snug Rye corner: ‘Your letters come into my damp desert here even as the odour of promiscuous spices or the flavour of lucent syrups tinct with cinnamon might be wafted to some compromised oasis from a caravan of the Arabian nights.’ The ...”

“... her favourite flower the ‘Cauliflower’ and her favourite trait in a matrimonial partner ‘Lamb Like Meekness’.) But it isn’t enough, any longer, to set the vinegary Cather against the naive. Her letters at their worst are needy, high-handed and reactionary (her extraordinary injunction against publishing them is the most self-aware thing about ...”

“... at Goldsmiths added to this sometimes rather austere cleverness the sparkle of his teacher Richard Wentworth’s playfulness (Hirst’s hairdryer and ping pong ball from 1994, called What Goes Up Must Come Down, has the punning neatness of Wentworth’s work). The English comedy of early Gilbert & George and a complicated mockery of class allegiance ...”

“... at any level from the molecular to the cellular to the entire organism and its behaviour. Richard Dawkins extended its definition by asserting that the dam a beaver builds is part of its phenotype.) Epigenetics seeks to explain how, starting from an identical set of genes, the contingencies of development can lead to different outcomes. To illustrate ...”

“... unravel mentally and physically. Starting out as a stereotypical man of action, Terrier resembles Richard Stark’s protagonist Parker, whose qualities Manchette listed in his diary: ‘L’insensibilité, la brutalité, l’obstination, la capacité professionnelle, la force. Parker est un sauvage.’ His emotions range from tensing his lips to grunting. His ...”

“... allowed the pope to hire and fire his English bishops and give their dioceses English placenames. Richard II’s prime aim in the Great Praemunire Statute of 1392 was to prevent the pope and his favoured cardinals from taking juicy revenues out of England. British membership of the EU has, per contra, attracted billions of foreign capital to Britain, while ...”

“... Elvis Presley’s top half on the Ed Sullivan Show; John F. Kennedy’s live debate with a melting Richard Nixon; an early episode of I Love Lucy; a dinner-table scene from The Waltons; Neil Armstrong’s One Small Step; the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald; the pilot show of Roseanne. Each viewer wore headphones; all you could hear was the giggles and gasps. On ...”

“... thin for many years, wins over the cruelty that locks me out of the fair fold where I slept as a lamb, foe to the wolves that make war against it; with other voice then, with other fleece I will return …In 1321, with the poem finished but still unpublished, Dante paid for his host’s hospitality by accepting a diplomatic mission to Venice; on his way back ...”

“... relation to Gascoigne’s Supposes and of its folklore elements. Antony Hammond’s edition of Richard III argues, no less convincingly, for an early dating of that play (1591). His introduction includes a shrewd discussion of the importance of role-playing in the play, and of the ways in which the consequent Verfremdungseffekt ‘lessens the realistic and ...”

“... Henry Brooke, John Bunyan, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Delaney [sic], Emanuel Ford, William Godwin, Richard Graves, Robert Greene, Robert Henryson, Charles Johnstone, Charles Lever, M.G. Lewis, Thomas Lodge, Henry MacKenzie [sic], Thomas Malory, Charles Maturin, Walter Scott, Philip Sidney, Horace Walpole ... twenty, plus the recognised fathers of the novel ...”

“... setting of Keats’s sonnet ‘To Sleep’ with, say, John Tavener’s setting of Blake’s ‘The Lamb’, to appreciate this. Tavener’s setting is original, attractively naive, touching, but it leaves one with the feeling that it is just one of many ways in which music could be fitted to these particular words, even that there are other possible words for ...”

“... of the relationship. For instance, in sonnet 62 Berryman sees himself as Chris’s sacrificial lamb: what makes you then this ominous wide blade I’d run from O unless I bleat to die? Nothing: you are not: woman blonde, called Chris. It is I lope to be your sheep, to wade Thick in my cordial blood, to howl and sigh As I decide ... if I could credit ...”

“... on the video, sniggered at the parodies – nobody has heard of, or cares about, Spring of the Lamb by Douglas Woolf. Sorry? Doesn’t ring a bell. One of the rarest, most delicately obtuse talents lost by America: a skeletal revenant too canny to leave any footprints in the dust. (‘He’s come down from Kellogg or Wallace – Idaho camptowns, feathery ...”

“... But Amis is less concerned with reconstituting the mysterious past of Mary Lamb (as she arbitrarily calls herself) than with exploiting her as a centre of deranged consciousness. For Mary the common world is defamiliarised. Thus, for instance, she tackles the telephone: Mary had watched people use the telephone several times and was ...”