“... like a moth beating against a bulb, briefly altering the light. In 1832, Carlyle reviewed John Wilson Croker’s new edition of Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, and emphasised, as Hermione Lee has noted, how biography, by recording ‘many a little Reality’, can make the reader see the world as it existed around the central figure, its depths and ...”

“... building, a 16th-century revision of the 13th-century church founded by the Knights of St John. The Hole is a statement and it is properly capitalised. The labourers, a self-confessed art collective, work the Hole by hand, with pick and shovel, turn and turn about: four days to complete a grave shaft, without any of the tortured grinding and ...”

“... of superannuated Pinter. There is always a war with real life. Storey describes a rehearsal with John Gielgud (as Harry) and Ralph Richardson (as Jack) of Home, his play about England and everyday madness. The actors are navigating their way around two chairs and a table. Storey starts by showing the two actors before segueing into what’s happening ...”

“... very much on the minds of the authors of the new three-volume biography of D.H. Lawrence, of which John Worthen’s D.H. Lawrence: The Early Years 1885-1912 is the first instalment. The theory, as Worthen explains it, is that having three different people write the life will be ‘an explicit (even dramatic) acknowledgment that, however, important the ...”

“... Room 101 syndrome: what Orwell’s protagonist says when a cageful of starved rats are about to burrow through his cheek and devour his tongue must undoubtedly be the truth. Since most of us who found ourselves in this situation would say anything at all, the strangeness of this doctrine should give us pause. Why should truth and extremity be thought to be ...”

“... In 1865, a year after John Clare’s death in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, Frederick Martin, a former amanuensis of Thomas Carlyle, published the first biography of the ‘peasant poet’. It laid the foundations, Jonathan Bate says in his new Life, ‘for both the enduring myths and some of the key truths about Clare ...”

“... of the brown rat. One night, in the poultry part of old Gansevoort Market, alongside the Hudson, a burrow of them bit the throats of over three hundred broilers and ate less than a dozen. Before this part of the market was abandoned, in 1942, the rats practically had charge of it. Some of them nested in the drawers of desks. When the drawers were pulled ...”

“... three short, pictorial essays about three dope-fiend authors, Thomas de Quincey, Marcel Schwob and John Keats. The essays are clearly the product of much reading – Jaeggy has translated Schwob’s Vies imaginaires and De Quincey’s Last Days of Immanuel Kant into Italian – though it’s the reading not of a scholar but an artist, interested only in what ...”

“... How might one recognise depression in a mouse? Who’s to say how an autistic rat will behave?John Bumpass Calhoun, the subject of these two books, was one of the most famous advocates of rodent experimentation in 20th-century psychology. In both Rat City and Lee Dugatkin’s Dr Calhoun’s Mousery he is treated as an eccentric visionary, whose insights ...”

“... Not that conditions in their Hampstead house were very different from those of the Sheffield ‘burrow’ – they were described by Robert Lowell as having ‘a weird, sordid nobility’ – but of course it was much larger, and the company tended to be noisy and numerous, whereas in Sheffield he depended on his middle-class academic colleagues for talk ...”

“... them. They are rarely loved as much as Shakespeare’s sonnets or the verse of Jonson’s friend John Donne. His plays are a different matter. Among his contemporaries no dramatist other than Shakespeare has overtaken him. The depictions in his comedies of social and economic fantasy, and of their exploitation, have never seemed more pertinent than amid our ...”

“... Corona’ to her, and years later preached at her funeral. In 1609 she was remarried, to Sir John Danvers, a cultured and attractive gentleman half her age; the marriage was evidently a happy one, and George Herbert enjoyed a close relationship with his young stepfather. Walton depicts Magdalen as a helicopter parent, at least in the case of her eldest ...”

“... hard pressed to choose between the exhilaration of setting off, and the safety of some delectable burrow. The scarpering Toad, a good fellow for all his wilfulness, has to be got out of more than one hole in the course of the story. Certainly this book, with its more supple style, and with the scope it offers for various kinds of interpretation, represents an ...”

“... on them. The waterfront becomes a place of longing, and Mitchell writes of it as hauntingly as John Lee Hooker sang of it. In 1938 Mitchell was hired by Harold Ross as a staff writer for the New Yorker, though his first contribution to the magazine had been published in 1933. He took up with writers like Philip Hamburger, S.J. Perelman and James ...”

“... simply don’t know how old they are. The most complete and compendious of these scholarly works, John Burrow’s The Ages of Man (1986), reaches back through Medieval to Classical times to show how very differently existence was measured before our own pervasive if shallow mathematical and technological revolution. He reminds us that the Gospels record ...”