“... outside St David’s Station, Exeter and a wry postcard, long ago, from Stanford, as well as more substantial talks. He was Donald Davie, who was born in Barnsley in 1922 and died in Devon last autumn, a precise and passionate poet and critic, the Empson or the Eliot of his generation. Or rather, he would have been the Empson or Eliot of his ...”

“... the attention of teachers and taught; that the literature of the past two hundred years alone is more than enough challenge for the three short years of undergraduate life. One accepts, too, that things were not helped by a tradition in teaching the history of the language that was more than a little offputting, even for ...”

“... the strain of the movement visible in the sinews of the thick, muscular neck – presenting its more finished profile to the viewer. The rougher surface of the side turned away from us is scarred by chisel marks, the features less clearly carved out. Viewed from the right angle, in the right light, in the right mood, it’s the portrait of a hero who ...”

“... Merciless Parliament of 1388, from which Chaucer’s former boss Brembre went to the gallows and Thomas Usk, one of the few people in the period who did mention Chaucer as a poet, to the more dreadful fate of hanging, drawing and beheading – he changed sides (to Chaucer’s) too soon and too prominently. The effect of ...”

“... Though she never married the Frog Prince of whom she was teasingly fond, or any of her other and more handsome suitors, she lived for a long time in peace and prosperity, governed her kingdom well, repelled its enemies and won the hearts and praise of most of her subjects. She has never really died. This is at once the stuff of fairytale, and it is ...”

“... Aids – or, more specifically, the lawsuits, criminal prosecutions and political recriminations that followed the transfusion of whole blood or blood products wittingly or unwittingly tainted with HIV – has renewed our interest in the sanguinary, and Douglas Starr has now set this interest in context. He describes his book as ‘the story of blood – the chronicle of a resource, the researchers who have studied it, the businessmen who have traded it, the doctors who have prescribed it, and the lay people whose lives it has so dramatically affected ...”

“... surprisingly frank about her failings; and her comments on the failings of some hotels and more or less identifiable restaurants, doctors and nurses are equally frank and usually entertaining. Wives may, as in this book, be a little too reverential when they write about their husbands. There is, however, some criticism here. Early in their marriage she ...”

“... foreign.) Little in their actual political records differentiates Biden from Clinton, but he can more persuasively tell an autoworker that his industry will return to the glories of the 1940s. When Trump first campaigned on the slogan ‘Make America Great Again’, he liked to do so in the shadow of abandoned steel ...”

“... geologist John Wesley Powell, who led the first expedition through the Grand Canyon in 1873. Thomas Moran, an experienced painter from Philadelphia, travelled with Powell, and had been to Wyoming and Montana with the US Geological and Geographical Survey two years earlier. The chief fruit of his journeys were his paintings of the Yellowstone and Colorado ...”

“... or otherwise. Governance, Foucault argues and Fassin and Rechtman agree, works as much, if not more, through the ‘production of truth’ as through the imposition of laws. The question is not whether someone actually is a victim of trauma but how the criteria for deciding who is a victim come into being and who manages them. ‘Governmentality’, as ...”

“... presence in the world didn’t dim.Secularism, reason, scepticism don’t bring disenchantment, Thomas Laqueur argues in this monumental study, the harvest of more than ten years’ concentrated exploring of archives, tombstones, battlefields and furnace design. Laqueur principally scrutinises developments since around ...”

“... When Thomas Jefferson left the Presidency he wrote to Dupont de Nemours: ‘Never did a prisoner released from his chains, feel such relief as I shall on shaking off the shackles of power. Nature intended me for the tranquil pursuits of science, by rendering them my supreme delight. But the enormities of the time in which I have lived, have forced me to take a part in resisting them, and to commit myself to the boisterous ocean of political passion ...”

“... of living space would have been affected by thinking of this kind. He is also aware – perhaps more aware than anyone – of the extent to which the Venetians used capitals plundered from Byzantium on their façades, and of how they then imitated and varied them and also delighted in fabricating decorative reliefs in a Byzantine style. But these were ...”

“... Library, the New York Academy of Medicine and Columbia’s rare book collections served those with more specialised needs.New York couldn’t compete with London or Paris: it had no bouquinistes, no Farringdon Road, no British Library or Bibliothèque nationale de France. It lacked the quaint bookshops of Boston, where the staff seemed to know not only the ...”

“... to become, for a while, so genuinely romantic and melodramatic, his fabrications seem to add yet more brio to the larger-than-life swagger; the shaggy-dog stories become part of a more general shagginess. He may not have cremated his dusky bride by the shore of a tropic sea, but he was to cremate Shelley on an Italian ...”