“... Victorian charwoman’.His name is not much known this side of the Channel, where there is as yet no biography of him or translation of his works. (A long-awaited life is in preparation by the leading Anglophone Cravaniste, Roger Lloyd Conover.) This lacuna is curious because although Cravan was Swiss by birth, and wrote exclusively in French, he was a mix of ...”

“... not on local but on state and national issues, as the pro-gun and pro-life candidate. Mayors have no say on abortion or on gun laws, but Palin got the support of the local Evangelicals (it greatly helped that her – Lutheran – opponent’s surname was Stein and her backers put it about that he was a Jew) and of gun-owners who keenly supported a bill, then ...”

“... of Latin at University College London; the abrupt appearance of A Shropshire Lad four years later (no mention in the surviving letters about writing or assembling poems), its slow take-off then rapid ascent; his election in 1911 as Kennedy Professor of Latin at Cambridge; his separate apotheoses as scholar and poet. Apart from a sabbatical term in 1934, he ...”

“... was an unsuccessful play in 1961, which gave her years of writer’s block) meant that she had no readerly expectations to live up to. Most readers encountered Molly Keane as a new writer, and even those who knew the connection with M.J. Farrell weren’t quite sure what it meant. The journalist Maureen Cleave wrote to Keane that the earl of ...”

“... most famous old boy from the days before Independence and his portrait hung in the school hall. I ate and drank with Russell for five years, often wondering what he was for and how on earth he had got to where he had from our common starting point in a Dublin suburb. Russell’s reputation was made by his brilliant defence of the Irish Nationalist MP ...”

“... the architectural history of various subway systems and the theory of names as it developed from John Stuart Mill to Saul Kripke, with, by way of comparison, a solid account of necronym taboos among various tribes. Films, photographs and museum exhibits are everywhere used in evidence, as is an enormous range of recondite archival material. As the founder ...”

“... where the expressive word, spoken or written, still seemed paramount – beneficiaries of what John Bayley once called “the inevitable solace that right language brings”. We were all, in varying degrees, sociable yet solitary.’It was a bold assertion. She was not only young, and relatively unproven, but the wrong gender; she was pushed right up ...”

“... made legs seem stumbling and stumpy, shortness there’. The madness, too, of her father, John Guthrie, whose eyes slip ‘up and down her dress’ when Chris is harassed by a local ‘daftie’ and ‘peep out’, like those of ‘a caged beast’, when he sees her in her knickers; who sneaks round the door of her room at night, ‘a great cat ...”

“... the course of the decade. The author turned ten in 1979. Some of what he discovers will come as no surprise to readers who lived through those years as half-awake adults: that, for example, environmentalism, feminism, gay rights and Rock Against Racism were for many people more important as politics than the parties led by Wilson and Callaghan, Heath and ...”

“... view, not to get something across, but to get it out – a sort of psychic expectoration. This is no accident, since early writers about free religious expression were principally concerned with ensuring that dispatches from the individual conscience could get aired. In the nascent free-speech doctrine, the interactive aspect of communication, other than with ...”

“... in church and fuss over the curates.Not all are living off their dwindling savings. No Fond Return of Love opens with a congregation (what would be the collective noun?) of spinsters at a conference for librarians, editorial assistants, indexers and freelance researchers ‘on the dustier fringes of the academic world’. Not everyone is dowdy ...”

“... history or papyrology, but from the words and the verse form of the poems themselves:There is no other poetry in the world as smooth and rapid as this epic poetry, in which the ideas of the particular passage seem fitted so perfectly, and yet so compactly, to the hexameter framework. And this smoothness is due, of course, to the use of a traditional ...”

“... dozens of women who found work at the Harvard College Observatory at a time when near enough to no women were employed in astronomy, or any other science, elsewhere. (An excellent book by George Johnson focuses on one of those women, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, the under-acknowledged astronomer who deduced a way to measure distances in space.) Writing about a ...”

“... then fled through the backstreets. More than thirty SS men were killed and dozens were injured.In no other Nazi-occupied city had partisans succeeded in such an audacious attack. Rome’s Gestapo chief, Herbert Kappler, was ordered to execute civilians at the rate of ten for every German killed (elsewhere it had been even worse: fifty for every ...”

“... titans – Milton Friedman versus who? – but in 1968 Walter Heller was a well-known figure. The hall, though large, wasn’t big enough to seat the hundreds of balding, besuited businessmen who showed up; closed-circuit televisions had to be installed in adjacent classrooms. Heller was the era’s most influential proponent of Keynesianism, then the ...”