“... older and tried hands: proven winners. As a cohort, novelists are MacArthur’s senior citizens. William Gaddis (1982) was awarded a fellowship at the age of 60, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1984) at 57, Susan Sontag (1990) at 59, Ernest J. Gaines (1993) at 60. Thomas Pynchon was a relatively young 51 when he won, but by 1988 ...”

“... numbers, Origen, the Great War, puns, madrigals, nail-making, Nye Bevan, biplanes, God, Thomas Bradwardine, Platonism, Messiaen, hawthorns, forgotten martyrs, Iceland, the Virgin, Welsh history, laurels, prophecy, cabalism). The instant sources of delight are lines that reverberate in the mind (‘A solitary axe-blow that is the echo of a lost ...”

“... price of standards is eternal vigilance.’ Contingency and struggle were the drivers of Thomas Pynchon’s great metrological novel Mason & Dixon, as they are of Crease’s book, whose special strength is attention to the last several decimal places of modern measurements, how they were arrived at through the 19th and 20th centuries, why and to whom ...”

“... In March​ 1718, 13-year-old William Murray, the 11th of Viscount Stormont’s 14 children, set off from the family seat at Scone, near Perth, on a pony. The journey to London, which he made alone, took him almost two months, and it is probable that he never saw Scotland again. Although it was a bare three years since the first Jacobite Rising had attempted to place the Old Pretender, James Edward Stuart, on the throne, and although the Murrays were well-known Jacobites, the family was well enough connected to ensure that, when he reached London, William was able to enter Westminster School and then Christ Church, Oxford, at both of which he shone as a scholar ...”

“... on 42nd Street, then one as a fashion editor at Harper’s Bazaar. A couple of years later, William Shawn hired her to write the ‘briefly noted’ reviews of historical novels and murder mysteries for the New Yorker.I asked people at the office who had known Maeve what she looked like when she arrived (strangely, I hadn’t been able to find any ...”

“... pretty systems’ that we ‘soon find ourselves obliged to destroy’. Karl Popper or Thomas Kuhn could not have put it better. In fact, Kuhn begins The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by echoing Priestley and identifying Franklin’s Experiments and Observations on Electricity as an example of a new and instantly convincing ...”

“... Milton drew on works by the Swiss theologian Johannes Wolleb and the English puritan divine William Ames. De Doctrina Christiana follows Wolleb and Ames in dozens of ways, from its Ramist structure to many of its definitions, although Milton does not acknowledge these borrowings. This occlusion need not be thought of as dishonest. Silently borrowed ...”

“... cohesion, Ferguson was no exception. He expressed confidence in his London-based publisher William Strahan, whose ear was ‘accustomed to a better dialect than my own’. Even the Ossian controversy, which embroiled Ferguson in argument with Thomas Percy, only highlights his lack of any serious nationalist ...”

“... The member yielded not seed but, at the Circumcision, blood. The Circumcision was described by St Thomas Aquinas as ‘a remedy for original sin, which is transmitted through the act of generation’. God further condescended when consenting to enact this sacramental admission of guilt, though of course free of it himself. Steinberg again and again ...”

“... with various combinations of energy, luck, ambition, ingenuity and persistence. The arch tinkerer, Thomas Alva Edison, built himself an X-ray machine within four days of learning of Roentgen’s discovery; he made a better tube, found the best material for making screens which fluoresced when struck by X-rays (it made the non-photographic use of X-rays ...”

“... though for different reasons. His intricate manoeuvres to secure the Presidency after Thomas Garrigue Masaryk’s resignation in 1935 inevitably won him many enemies. As foreign minister from 1918, his unwillingness to continue to let Czechoslovaks participate in the intervention against Soviet Russia had infuriated conservatives such as Karel ...”

“... has something in common here with The Little Girls, or The Death of the Heart, as well as with William Trevor’s The Old Boys. Naturally enough, all three distinguished novelists contrive to keep the subject clear of the standard treatment given it by afternoon plays on the BBC (‘Stephanie has come back in middle age to the town where fate once dealt ...”

“... a Victorian rendition of Victor Cousin’s commentary on Kant (a triple motion of change), Sir Thomas Nugent’s Montesquieu, a moment from William Morris’s Aeneid directly inspired by Beowulf, or a comparison ‘of the meshing of knowledge and intuition’ in six 20th-century translations of Matthew XXVI:30. Time and ...”

“... yet. On the contrary, the poetic scene is full of people who believe that by writing like Edward Thomas, on the one hand, or William Carlos Williams, on the other, they can recover or reconstitute innocence in their medium. And even a senior poet like Norman MacCaig, who is too old a hand to chase such a will of the ...”

“... appearance) to the Canary Islands, where (Spanish) bananas are still grown. A Spanish monk, one Thomas de Berlanga, may have been responsible for the fruit’s subsequent journey to the Americas, for he planted it in San Domingo in 1516; the English, those comparative latecomers to the New World, saw its wonderful obliging nature, and took many banana ...”