“... her spelling improved, she seems always to have struggled with it (Horner suggests that she may have been dyslexic). Her publisher’s decision not to correct the text of Sisters by a River reinforces the quality of ‘savage innocence’ that Horner ascribes to her subject.The Bayleys’ marriage was turbulent and Margaret had a difficult labour with ...”

“... most delightful melodies and attracting composers from Mozart and Beethoven to Saint-Saëns and Richard Strauss to write music for the instrument. I once heard Bruno Hoffmann, the most celebrated modern exponent, play his version of Franklin’s glass armonica. The sound was unforgettable – piercing, melancholy, otherworldly. And we have not mentioned the ...”

“... men performing public roles. An artist who found his work in the king’s collection, though he may have seen it lost from public view, was not in the pay of a private individual. As Cowen points out, the great era of private patronage is the present day, when unheard-of numbers of private individuals are able to contribute something to artistic ...”

“... The death of Dennis Potter may have been authored by God, but it was adapted for television by Potter himself. It began after a brief report in the Guardian suggested that Potter’s terminal cancer related to his lifelong addiction to nicotine. By return there was a gleeful letter from Potter revelling in the Potteresque fact that far from his ‘beloved cigarettes’ being the culprits, his forthcoming death from pancreatic cancer was probably iatrogenic: the result of years of lethal medication ...”

“... turn one of them off. It’s a good service, a model, with none of the speakers – his two sons, Richard Eyre and Robert Bathurst – outstaying their welcome and Ben vividly recalled.Bathurst is particularly good, reading a Betjeman poem about golf, following it up with a very funny (and almost better) poem in parody by Ben himself. Since I know him chiefly ...”

“... historians of the modern period, as well as others, would do well to take ritual seriously. They may discover that its role hasn’t changed as much as one would think it had, despite the disappearance, at any rate in the industrialised world, of ‘traditional’ societies. ‘Traditional societies’, though, is much too vague. There are important ...”

“... vanished from the world. What people forget is how long it was kept up. Reared on books like Richard Foster Jones’s The Triumph of the English Language, students and teachers of English literature, as of English history, tend to assume that if a book isn’t in English then it must be ‘obscurantist, untypical and irrelevant’. By making this ...”

“... a hit-and-run driver (the miseries in Wilson’s narratives are invariably the acts of a God who may perhaps just be an insurance company fiction). Giles remained, a sightless scholar blundering uselessly in his library. As we encounter him, he is attended by two virgins: his luscious teenage daughter Tibba and his dowdy amanuensis, Miss Agar ...”

“... chemistry, quarrelled with leading figures and advanced slowly. His close friend, the chemist Richard Willstätter, said that Haber’s ‘early failure was complete and of long duration’. Einstein had his doctoral thesis rejected, was turned down as a teaching assistant, and complained in 1901 that he had offered himself unsuccessfully to every ...”

“... historical contexts. A.A. Long’s recent book on Epictetus, like the work of Martha Nussbaum and Richard Sorabji on ancient philosophical therapy, reminds us of something lost in the modern academy and not at all prominent in Kenny, but regarded by all major Greek and Roman thinkers from Socrates on as the heart of the matter: the idea and practice of ...”

“... prose style with its witty banter, metaphorical gusto, dazzling vocabulary and sheer erudition may be seen as a heroic attempt to pull himself out of the quagmire by turning all that happens to or around him into fineness. He is a pathological enhancer, whether of his own gaucheries and existential contingencies, other people’s table-talk or ...”

“... When​ Richard Wright sailed to France in 1946, he was 38 years old and already a legend. He was America’s most famous black writer, the author of two books hailed as classics the moment they were published: the 1940 novel Native Son and the 1945 memoir Black Boy. By ‘choosing exile’, as he put it, he hoped both to free himself from American racism and to put an ocean between himself and the Communist Party of the United States, in which he’d first come to prominence as a writer of proletarian fiction only to find himself accused of subversive, Trotskyist tendencies ...”

“... considering the question, ‘What is an author?’ The two, needless to say, never met. Foucault may have visited Texas on one of his lecture tours, but Junior, as far as it is known, never took his S&M revelry beyond the Ivy League – novelists will have to invent a chance encounter in a basement club in Austin. Moreover, Junior’s general ignorance of ...”

“... the Dardanelles?’ they used to shout at him whenever he got up in Parliament – though that may have been unfair: most of the government and the high command, including Kitchener, were initially behind him. Kitchener’s reputation ended up pretty battered too, though he was drowned before it became a problem. Gallipoli has become one of those military ...”

“... organisation on unsuspecting civilian targets and a massive Japanese attack on a naval base may seem a misjudgment, but it was not surprising. That a president would use such a crisis for his own purposes – Roosevelt effectively, Bush disastrously – might also have been expected. But that ‘Ground Zero’, the hypocentre of the first nuclear bomb ...”