“... of each operation … Quality is quantifiable!’ Henry conspires with his brother Thomas, a dodgy banker who is quick to recognise ‘the huge profits which were to be made from the government’s privatisation programme’. Then there’s Dorothy Winshaw, the owner of a company that produces cheap meat products and the developer of a small ...”

“... in the Poe poem that the line ‘donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu’ occurs) and ever more giddying feats of abolition, the Prynne poem actively invites contamination, draws to itself the rags and rubbish (the ‘matter out of place’) that poetry typically excludes or refines. Its language is a site of migrating meanings, shifts of ...”

“... pictures, propped up in bed. Blackburn’s book is composed of digressions, an associative dérive more than a biographical account. One of the central notions is ‘drifting’, which becomes the book’s ostensible method: I cannot find what has been lost, no matter how often I search for it. All I can do is to hold a few facts and images in my mind’s eye ...”

“... For the Sake of Argument records a life of action, of being in the right place at the right time. Thomas Mann could never find the revolution: Hitchens cannot help tripping over it. This is, no doubt, the privilege of the foreign correspondent, but some are clearly more privileged than others. He turns up in Central ...”

“... required to draw a map of old Palestine, ‘indicating the position of the Jewish tribes’. Thomas Jervis’s map of the Crimean peninsula Biblical Palestine loomed large in the teaching of geography for generations of British children: I can remember drawing maps of it at Sunday school in the 1960s, to accompany my own newspaper supplement featuring ...”

“... dead white males. Since then, there have been efforts to expand disciplinary canons to incorporate more women and greater racial and ethnic diversity. At first glance, the inclusion of Catharine Macaulay’s writings in the influential Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought looks like a straightforward example of this. But there is a less obvious ...”

“... next, which looks like the front of a Eurostar train, for M; while in 1819 the British polymath Thomas Young thought the lion stood for OLE; the Eurostar for MA; the two feathers for I; and the bent line, probably a fold of cloth, for OS: ‘Thus we have precisely PTOLEMAIOS.’What Champollion did was unsheathe Occam’s razor, dispense with syllabograms ...”

“... demonstrating, rather neatly it was thought (by the then sitting tenant of this space in the LRB, Thomas Jones, among others), that at the end of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Hercule Poirot hit on a wrong solution to the crime, that the too devious Dame Agatha had for once thrown even herself off the scent. I was on the point of adding that, of course, this ...”

“... Richard Holmes published Shelley: The Pursuit in 1974. More than a decade later, in Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (1985), he recalled how obsessive his engagement gradually became, not just with Shelley, but with that whole group of English expatriates associated with him, as it moved from Geneva through Italy – Bagni di Lucca, Este, Venice, Rome, Naples, Ravenna, Pisa – shedding some members and adding others, before finally disintegrating when Shelley and Edward Williams were drowned off Leghorn in July 1822 ...”

“... was a belief that Henry VII should be better known, and that is also a guiding principle of Thomas Penn’s account of the last decade of his reign. Today’s historians have tried to get away from what Stanley Chrimes called ‘seductive Baconian phrases’; their aim has been to resist Bacon’s ‘imaginative power’ and understand the king and his ...”

“... and American governments know perfectly well how and for what reasons he came to be prosecuted. More important than the present passing storm is whether any aspect of the investigation that led to al-Megrahi’s original conviction was also about oil, or dictated by other factors that should have no place in a prosecution process. The devastation caused by ...”

“... scope and ambition, although he does have a certain amount in common with the Auden of more occasional pieces, in particular the choruses and songs composed for film and theatre projects in the 1930s. Tessimond was born in Birkenhead in 1902 into a relatively prosperous middle-class family; his father was a bank inspector. Like ...”

“... have written with distinction in a language that was not their first. Native language matters more than native place. Robert Frost was a Californian who entrenched himself in New England. T.S. Eliot, for all his Russell Square papistry, came from St Louis. These poets grew to be associated with the territories they adopted and which adopted them. The idea ...”

“... to Cinna’s death illustrates an axiom in information theory, textual criticism and gossip: the more often a message is transmitted, the more corrupted it becomes. The word ‘Cinna’ is passed from mouth to mouth in a large group, and eventually, inevitably, misinterpreted. ‘The first man told it to another, and that ...”

“... not impossible, to imagine Bernard Shaw at a loss for words. The thing indeed occurred in 1928 at Thomas Hardy’s funeral, when Shaw and Kipling were paired in the procession of mourners but could find nothing whatever to say to each other. Shaw’s own excuse was that it was absurd to have coupled such a tall man with such a very short one. This is very ...”