“... comma in Shakespeare’s 29th Sonnet. To point out that in fact it is a semicolon that is at stake may not entirely dispel the suspicions of lemon-squeezing pedantry which thus arise, but a reading of Barrell’s chapter on Shakespeare certainly does: he is one of those rare scholar-critics who can make matters of punctuation genuinely interesting. The ...”

“... up into a titanic figure, and then try to make a ‘human interest’ story out of him. This may or may not be credible, but I do not think it is very interesting. Was anything about Hubbard interesting, apart from his habit of staffing his ship with nymphets and having people who displeased him thrown into the ...”

“... of Ignazio Florio, a member of one of the few prospering families on the island, and he may have helped her through lean times. She was an inestimable influence on her son, as David Gilmour makes plain. Giuseppe was born the year her first child, Stefania, died; when Giuseppe joined the infantry in the First World War, she wrote with extravagant ...”

“... giving offence to the populace’, they should ‘out of doors, speak with caution of what may be passing here’. To ‘the populace’, their researches seemed fearful, particularly because of their hunger for recently dead bodies. In 1871, John Hunter testified, as an expert witness in a trial, that he had dissected ‘some thousands’ of human ...”

“... had dropped by some ten million – i.e. to a half of what it had originally been. Readers may or may not be sceptical about the accuracy of this figure, which depends largely on guesswork as to the size of the Congo’s population before colonisation, together with an acceptance at face-value of the figures yielded ...”

“... eye we open or what arrangement of lenses we peer through. That the provisionality of history may not be its problem and might be its point is a truth so widely acknowledged that (you might imagine) it can hardly stand telling again. But it’s the way he tells it: not as a theoretical piety or as a preamble to ignoring it, but by sketching ...”

“... stormy narcissism, and of Ransom’s detached courtliness, and to suspect that lovable Red Warren may not have been as cheerful as he seemed. The deft insiderism that marked some of Jarrell’s most memorable quips could easily be taken as an earnest of his genuine highmindedness – this mockery, the manner seemed to say, was literary not personal – and ...”

“... the same demon that drove Hooper on his quest for the source of Aids, that modern caput Nili. He may, or may not, have found that source; he has certainly written a gripping mystery ...”

“... universe. Yet they were also very different men. Haber’s pragmatic conversion to Protestantism may have been unusual, but in other respects he was the model of an assimilated middle-class Jew. Like the subjects of two shorter essays here – the immunologist Paul Ehrlich (inventor of chemotherapy) and the physicist Max Planck – Haber embraced German ...”

“... about it, he is someone who spends most of his time making or studying or working with art, and it may well be that Millbank’s curatorial staff don’t care tuppence about the reactions of such people – that they’re addressing schoolchildren and tourists. If that is not their defence, they should abandon this hang – intended to last a ‘year or ...”

“... disclaimers about ever having been a Nazi or a traitor, because he had only weeks to live and it may have been among his last efforts. The one from his fragrant wife survives, and reads as follows:Mr Hitchens, in his attack upon me, says that I regretted the defeat of Germany in the Second World War. On the contrary, in my view the greatest tragedy for us ...”

“... before the delicatessens took over, he has a few sentences about the kind of life Manchester may be leaving behind: ‘This street culture is not about civic pride and marketing initiatives … It can, and will, thrive in crappy coffee bars, under leaking roofs or down unlit roads. It’s uncontrollable, uncomfortable and never far removed from the ...”

“... in its first form was typed in the summer of 1947 and completed by October. Between the middle of May 1948 and early November 1948 Orwell revised the work, and the final typescript was sent to Secker and Warburg on 4 December. The English edition was published on 8 June 1949, the American a few days later. Only pages 25-38 – Goldstein’s testament – of ...”

“... I see you were well trained in Hindu logic by your guru. But I hope under this roof the climate may be more conducive to truth than to lies. At least, that is the way we are trying to bring up our children.’ Is a high – perhaps excessive – regard for factual truth another step in the process of Westernisation? It is hard to say because Masterji, by ...”

“... chill aperçu that the reason ‘emulation and contention’ were endemic among anatomists may have been that ‘the passive submission of dead bodies, their common objects’, rendered them ‘less able to bear contradiction’. The daring of Outram’s undertaking, by contrast, lies precisely in its reaching for the parts specialist history of ...”