“... Year’s Day 1471, when he described ‘the new order of book-makers from Germany, who have poured forth everywhere (as from a Trojan Horse)’. Centuries of printing preceded Gutenberg. As White is careful to describe, Gutenberg was born nine hundred years after printed texts were first produced in China by rubbing paper onto inked, carved woodblocks. A ...”

“... Select Works came out in 1876 there was more for the world to respect. ‘Burke will always stand forth as a man whose political knowledge was complete,’ wrote the editor, E.J. Payne. ‘He was therefore, though a reformer, incapable of rash and inconsiderate action. The man who has arrived at a view of the whole plan of civil society, and taken in the ...”

“... here is his ambition to write a new kind of English poem with what he described in his poem to Christopher Isherwood as a ‘strict and adult pen’. Elaborating on this, in his introduction to The Auden Generation, Samuel Hynes characterises the sought-after new art as follows: ‘Auden was urging a kind of writing that would be ...”

“... book should be read twice, unless it was this that actually caused the delay. The mountain brought forth a mouse. Other People was treated last in a short review of four novels at the bottom of the page. But it was an appreciative mouse. The review ended up with the reviewer ‘purring with pleasure’. So the mouse was probably a cat.But this was ...”

“... conjurer] who ‘... can be seen rising up into the air with a small horse’. and so forth, for page after page. So many quotations from obscure writers stun the reader into acceptance: after all, I have not read Galeotto Marzio da Narni or Simeon Zuccolo di Cologna, or many others from his array of sources. Furthermore, nothing Camporesi ...”

“... means, showing up incoherence, filling in jumps in logic, unmasking false conclusions, and so forth. But is this the way to read Plato, to make his questions one’s own? Can one learn from him in this way, or does one simply confirm one’s own superiority? What holds for Plato holds mutatis mutandis for all philosophy. The answer to Gadamer’s two ...”

“... feature of this wilfulness. ‘I must begin by apologising to Professor Ricks,’ his piece about Christopher Ricks’s book on Tennyson begins. ‘What follows is less a review of his excellent book, the best study of Tennyson I have read, than a series of personal reflections on the poet suggested to me by reading it.’ Maybe something of the sort is more ...”

“... in The Fatty Arbuckle Story) or professional golfers (Hugh Grant in The Phil Mickelson Story, Christopher Walken in The Chi Chi Rodriguez Story). He and a partner ominously rent an office more than a hundred floors up in the World Trade Center. ‘Seems kind of flimsy up here,’ Otis says. ‘Nah,’ the partner says, ‘built like a battleship.’ Horst ...”

“... At Thomas Hodgkin’s memorial service, in 1982, Christopher Hill, formerly Master of Balliol, used the pulpit of the college chapel to give an address entirely free of religious reference, quite a feat in view of Hodgkin’s Quaker roots and Hill’s status as historian of the Puritan revolution. ‘God was dead all right when you wrote that speech,’ I said to Hill afterwards ...”

“... do much without Ray’s driving energy.’ She even found time, despite the birth of her son, Christopher, and periods of near constant bleeding and pain from uterine fibroids, to campaign for the removal of the iron grille from the Ladies’ Gallery of the Commons, allowing women a clear view when, on 6 February 1918, the Representation of the People Act ...”

“... was described by its publisher Humphrey Moseley as ‘as true a Birth as the Muses have brought forth since our famous Spenser wrote’ when it appeared in what we now call January 1646. By that date Milton was in his late thirties, an age by which it was quite possible for a 17th-century Londoner to be dead. He had written pamphlets advocating divorce on ...”

“... work hitherto much less influential than the very early (and prodigious) Seven Types of Ambiguity. Christopher Norris comes right out and calls Complex Words ‘a work of deconstruction’. His collection is meant to demonstrate that Empson can be accommodated in modern theory. It can now be shown that he was in many ways anticipating the interests and ...”

“... unHomeric orchestration which leaves out the reference to the Greeks’ low morale. In Kings, Christopher Logue’s rewriting of Books One and Two (a kind of sequel to his War Music, 1981, a version of Books Sixteen to Nineteen), the line is rendered: ‘And as it is with soldiers, / Sad as we were a laugh or two went up.’ Two changes stand out, which ...”

“... lives. She remembered it in the minutest detail: the pints after work, the rides back and forth on the train, his search for ever spicier curries, the imagined dimness of his apartment with its crates of obscure records, the green waving gentleness of it all. She stood up and held him, she could not help it. He felt as breakable as a link in her ...”

“... to do well, no matter what our blunders may be.’ In Liberal vision, the lamp of reason blazes forth to scatter the forces of tradition, obscurantism, convention, violence, deceit, formality, Medieval superstition and unearned privilege. Many of these forces were seen as lurking within the Tory Party, described by Mill as the ‘stupid party’. The ...”