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“... futuristic. It was, in Alvarez’s phrase, ‘outer space with bad weather’. This is the story Christopher Harvie has to tell. His is an immensely important book – astonishingly, there is no other good account in print of the North Sea phenomenon which has changed the world oil market, transformed the British and Norwegian economies ...”

“... on which 650 contributors recorded the details of 30,000 lives. And, as with the painting of the Forth Bridge, once this great Victorian monument was completed it was time to start all over again. In 1901, a three-volume supplement appeared, repairing important omissions from the original work, and adding in those worthies who had died since its ...”

“... descriptions, the corrector sounds like some combination of child genius, automaton and loyal dog. Christopher Plantin praised his son-in-law’s potential for correcting because he has never been passionately interested in anything so much as the study of the Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Chaldean, Syriac and Arabic tongues (in which those who confer with him ...”

“... to notice such things’ would have become a bore if he had insisted on noticing everything. Christopher Wood’s glamorous and glowing picture book (Pre-Raphaelite pictures seem to suit Japanese printers) offers useful information about the extended Pre-Raphaelite team he presents. He favours the every-dog-will-have-his-day attitude to Victorian ...”

“... Malley’s Urn, a jokey homage to the famous hoax. In My Life as a Fake, the literary hoaxer, Christopher Chubb, ‘came from the dreary lower-middle-class suburbs. I would say he loathed where he came from.’ The motive for his will-to-hoax is laid at the door of this frustrated provincialism – which is to say, at the door of frustrated ...”

“... Lawrence admitted, were ‘amusing, not terribly important’. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Christopher Pollnitz’s scrupulous documentation of every tweaked comma and reworked typewriter carbon shows just how much variants and revisions really mattered to Lawrence. It’s not just that he heavily revised his earlier rhyming verse before issuing his ...”

“... a succession of intellectual men, and seems to have sat gratifyingly at their feet while they held forth. In her diary, she gave them the names of heroes from the classics. The journalist Eric Siepmann was Antony: ‘We became much to each other, then lost much. He has genius, it will never flower … He is the most exciting man I have ever met. The most ...”

“... as if the writer is sitting, glass in hand, in a sunset home for retired correspondents, holding forth once more with his favourite tales: my row with Adenauer, my bigger row with General Templer, my ‘scoop’ of the Dead Sea Scrolls, my meeting with Glubb Pasha (again likened to a chubby curate), my air crash in Israel, my sight of the frozen bodies of ...”

“... the same time as the young Scott was rehearsing solo cavalry charges on the sands of the Firth of Forth, with more conscientiousness than his companions thought decent. Muir, a revolutionary, added a detested novelty to Scottish politics – republicanism. Respectable Scotland reached for its Yeomanry sabres. They looked to Lord Braxfield, who is introduced ...”

“... Russells, the family settled in County Dublin, and Farrell spent his schooldays shuttling back and forth across the Irish Sea, coming to feel Irish in England and English in Ireland. At prep school in Cheshire, where he was made head boy, and later at public school near Blackpool, he showed an aptitude for languages and sport. If not quite an unreflective ...”

“... is a standard accessory of the Jacobean ‘gent’, his authenticating personalised stamp: ‘take forth paper, fold it, write upon’t, read it, afterwards seal it’ (Macbeth V.i). It is handsome, expensive and chunky – Wheler gives its weight as ‘12 dwt’ (i.e. 12 pennyweights), which is equivalent to about two thirds of an ounce. One may call it a ...”

“... not come down the ladder, they have taken it away.’ But some of the bulls Ricks leads forth from Beckett don’t deserve the name, though for other reasons they earn the rosette he awards them. As in Murphy: ‘He closed his eyes and fell back. It was not his habit to make out cases for himself. An atheist chipping the deity was not more senseless ...”

“... philosophers) reads (Anglophone, analytic) philosophy these days. But, having just worked through Christopher Hughes’s Kripke: Names, Necessity and Identity, I am no longer puzzled. That may sound as though I’m intending to dispraise the book, but to the contrary; I think it’s a fine piece of work in lots of ways. To begin with, the topic is well ...”

“... the blues and his responses to that performance.Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,         I heard a Negro play.Down on Lenox Avenue the other nightBy the pale dull pallor of an old gas light         He did a lazy sway …         He did a lazy sway …To the tune o’ those Weary Blues.The distance ...”

“... the youthful and impatient, Carter the introspective, Nixon the driven, Reagan the folksy and so forth, ad, if not indeed well in advance of, nauseam. Then the scholars move in to give needed ‘balance’ and ‘perspective’ to these popular fables. A novelist need not do either He can dispense with banality. He can raise intrigue to the level of ...”