“... before its formation, met in Oxford, and many of its key members, including Christopher Wren and Thomas Willis, were professors of astronomy or natural philosophy there. Change happened not because a few radical outsiders toppled a conservative mainstream, but because the mainstream was able to accommodate change within traditional frameworks. Take the ...”

“... The hyper-courtly​ Sir Thomas Wyatt wrote a verse satire in the mid-1530s that begins: ‘My mother’s maids, when they did sew and spin,/They sang sometime a song of the field mouse.’ Wyatt goes on to relate the song, which is pretty much the story of the town mouse and the country mouse as told by Horace in his Satires with some added shivers of late Henrician courtly horror ...”

“... of the worst thing you could do’. And here is Hardwick at the public library discovering Thomas Mann, whose Death in Venice has been mis-shelved in the murder mystery section. (A lesser woman would have put it back.) In 1934, she went to the University of Kentucky, where she sought out ‘the literary people and the political people’. ‘I have a ...”

“... should be replaced,’ and the faux-Cosmati pulpit similarly. Apropos guides we are using Henry Thorold’s Shell Guide to County Durham written in 1980 which recommends a visit to Finchale (pronounced Finkle) Priory set in a bend of a river just north of Durham, of whose remoteness and unspoiled beauty Thorold gives a lyrical description. No more ...”

“... even Hemingway’s white-boned prose acquired loose flaps. Two years later, still stricken with Thomas Wolfe elephantiasis, Styron sends haunted dispatches from the asphalt jungle. ‘New York is vast, hideous and strewn with the wrecks of lost and fidgeting souls.’ Unlike so many others of his word-besotted WWII-vet generation, he would retain this Old ...”

“... media as ‘the Congo Crisis’ – were funded by Belgian and American business interests. As Thomas Kanza explained a decade later in Conflict in the Congo (1972), the separatists ‘were dependent, ideologically and financially, on the mining companies. Their political motives were dictated by the Europeans who made common cause with them.’ The mining ...”

“... was a home student at Somerville. In 1882, she got a first-class degree in English, the first of Thomas Arnold’s female grandchildren so to distinguish herself.At Oxford she met another offspring of a famous dynasty, T.H. Huxley’s son, Leonard. The young man had been a brilliant undergraduate. Should he marry, he would forfeit a career in law, politics ...”

“... only one further meeting. Just after the opening of An Ideal Husband to great notices (though Henry James hated it), Wilde bumps into Conan Doyle and asks him if he’s seen the play. Conan Doyle hasn’t. Wilde said with a grave face: ‘Ah you must go. It is wonderful. It is genius!’ And Conan Doyle thinks he’s gone mad. He’s never seen swanking ...”

“... a medium spoke in the presence of Mrs William James of a communication from a ‘Mary’ to Henry, the message was dutifully passed on to Henry James in England, who wrote that it was his ‘dear Mother’s unextinguished consciousness breaking through the interposing vastness of the universe and pouncing upon the ...”

“... Nora Barnacle’s hotel might well have been lost on Beckett. He specialised, after all, unlike Henry James, in allowing many things to be entirely lost on him. Like Wilde, he belonged to that group of Protestant geniuses who thought they should speak up just as their land-owning and money-owning colleagues were clearing out of Ireland or learning to keep ...”

“... Australians takes up less space in Australians: 1888 than in other volumes, but the findings of Henry Reynolds’s chapter on the subject are incisive: for most of the colonists, including many who benefited from Aboriginal labour, ‘the destruction of their society was seen as evidence of their own success.’The Oral History Project undertaken by the ...”

“... by a poet called Donagh MacDonagh, otherwise known as the national orphan, since his father, Thomas MacDonagh, had been executed by the British for his part in the 1916 Rebellion. Later O’Brien paid a visit to Joyce’s father, then living in Drumcondra, where the best English is spoken, who was partly bedridden and expressed the view that his son ...”

“... 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’. Though there have been other biographies since ...”

“... and of the headmastership of James Prince Lee, a future bishop of Manchester and a disciple of Thomas Arnold, whose educational ideals – the strenuous pursuit of knowledge and the cultivation of elevated tone and Christian character – Edward was to perpetuate in his own career. When he was still a student at Cambridge in 1850 his mother and eldest ...”

“... dated to the Grand Siècle, the time of the voyages to Mughal India of François Bernier or Thomas Coryate. Distinctions between the more advanced European cultures in the volume or quality of travellers’ tales would be difficult to make for most of the modern period. In the Enlightenment, for every Cook there was a Bougainville or Georg ...”