“... the science that came most immediately into conflict with scripture, obliging Lyell’s teacher William Buckland to contain his visions of lost worlds and extinct monsters within the biblical framework of Creation, Fall and Deluge. Lyell, by birth a Tory squire but by conviction a metropolitan Whig, had a solid grasp of conservative anxieties: he abstained ...”

“... 1907. The Times fatally compromised its case by forging a letter slandering the publisher John Murray and publishing it in its columns. Murray brought a libel action, and won £7000 damages. The Book Club was wound up. (The latest NBA brouhaha has blown up when the Times is again accused of cooking its correspondence ...”

“... solid biographies of Eisenhower in two volumes (1983-84) and Nixon in three (1987-91). And though William McFeely won a Pulitzer Prize for his Grant (1981), that did not deter Jean Edward Smith from publishing a massive new Grant (2001), which some politicians have been reading with furtive pleasure because it finds that Gilded Age Administration less corrupt ...”

“... frankness’. Alliances with the Wahhabi were mooted seventy years before the explorer Captain William Shakespear’s momentous friendship with Ibn Saud, which began Britain’s long and dubious relationship with that dour autocracy and which ended for Shakespear with his death in 1915 while photographing the charge of Ibn Saud’s cavalry, making him ...”

“... comments on translations of Greek tragedies – he was happy schoolmastering Gilbert Murray, R.C. Trevelyan, Robert Fitzgerald, and Christopher Logue – and some lively words on Spenser, George Herbert and Norse sagas. These pieces are interesting, but it’s a pity he didn’t take his journalism seriously. I think he was damaged by a theory he ...”

“... and he spent a great deal of time and energy generating anecdotes about himself,’ his colleague Murray Gell-Mann announced at Feynman’s memorial service, firmly flouting the nil nisi bonum convention. Feynman was also, among other things, a jerk. At his father’s funeral, he refused to recite the Kaddish, making his mother break down and cry. He seduced ...”

“... to translate Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics. He abandoned a (now lost) dramatic tragedy about William Wallace after two acts, and his best-known poem, ‘Auld Reekie’, was envisaged as a work in more cantos than the magnificent one and a bit that survive. Fergusson’s oeuvre, as we have it today, consists essentially of brilliant, occasional, often ...”

“... and, separately, from the United States Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, whose boss, General William Westmoreland, had the Shakespearean sounding title of COMUSMACV. (In the flesh, Westy came over more as a hard-driving business executive.) On one busy day in the flourishing Saigon black market I bought an American fatigue uniform, boots, jungle hat and ...”

“... career. A Little History of Poetry canters from Gilgamesh and Homer to Mary Oliver and Les Murray in three hundred pages with a breezy sense of mission, assuming in the reader no previous acquaintance with the subject (‘Confessional poetry is poetry that reveals personal confidences, especially relating to mental illness and hospitalisation’) or ...”

“... merely a quarter of a fifth of those so far available, but one would not want the volume longer. William Walton is no prose stylist, not much of an anecdotalist, and his letters reveal remarkably little about him. They are nearly always utilitarian – money, advice, favours to be sought, contracts to be finalised, parts to be corrected, a libretto to be ...”

“... the help of the obituary notice contributed to the Proceedings of the British Academy for 1977 by William McNeill, an American scholar who has a close affinity with his subject. Toynbee was born in 1889 into a family with Evangelical associations; like the celebrated uncle he was named after, his father was a social worker. At Winchester he was trained to win ...”

“... expansive 18th-century Gaelic poem on deer (echoes of which can be heard in Crichton Smith and Les Murray) is juxtaposed with John Davidson’s ‘A Runnable Stag’. This should have been the book which set the agenda for all future collections of Scottish poetry, but we have had to wait over half a century for a comprehensive anthology which followed ...”

“... at the triumphs and disasters of Wimbledon and the Olympics. He points out nicely that Andy Murray followed Kipling’s injunction to ‘treat those two impostors just the same’, which is inscribed over the entrance to the Centre Court, by weeping both when he lost and when he won. I share Dixon’s weak – or is it strong? – tear ducts. As he ...”

“... workers could extract and prepare for shipping more than twelve thousand tons of coal.In 1938, William Earl Turner moved to Lynch and was assigned a bed in one of the company boarding houses for single miners. Turner had been working in and around Central Appalachia since he left school, aged twelve, nine years earlier. Within a year of arriving in Lynch ...”

“... John Austin. Needless to say, Austin achieved nothing in his lifetime. He refused offers from John Murray to republish his London University lectures, not entirely, as the Hamburgers fairly suggest, out of indolence, but also because his ideas on the law and related political questions had changed. From Benthamite radical in favour of democracy, law reform and ...”