“... in the second. The implication, perhaps, is that the 1980s were judged by the two editors, Leonard Michaels and Christopher Ricks, to be likely to rate correctness of language above its political and social implications, while the 1990s will reverse these priorities. There is little point in taking issue with this, since in practice such divisions ...”

“... Other changes seem to display a shift in Mr Laurence’s romantic emphases: Greer Garson arrives; Leonard Bernstein departs. More interesting is the partial reversal of Mr Laurence’s estimate of Shaw’s criticism of Brahms. In 1960 he quoted Shaw’s remark that ‘Brahms is just like Tennyson, an extraordinary musician, with the brains of a ...”

“... copy about his escape from the Boers, the Siege of Sidney Street, or Gallipoli? Who could fail to read about all this with pleasure, except someone who had read it all before a dozen times? This train of speculation leads us closer to the mark. The official biography, and Churchill’s own works, are far too extensive for ...”

“... man’s widow. The significant thing, though, is that Marrot’s generation (his book was widely read and instantly reprinted) retained a faith in the writer not just as hero but as a kind of secular saint. Recalling the mild furore a few years ago over Robert Gittings’s life of Hardy, with its intimations that the great advocate of loving-kindness could ...”

“... Tony Parsons is the talented journalist who used to play Leonard Bast to Tom Paulin’s rentier intellectual on Late Review, the BBC’s weekly parade of Schlegelisms. He was the mean little man with the Estuary accent who was entitled to his views. He currently writes a column for the Mirror and his opinions spill forth also now in novels ...”

“... that day. When I began to write, it seemed to me there was no point in writing. Katherine won’t read it. Katherine’s my rival no longer.While Mansfield was alive, Woolf had found her ‘cheap and hard’, ‘unpleasant’ and ‘utterly unscrupulous’. It bothered her that she wasn’t sure if Mansfield liked her – letters and invitations often went ...”

“... the Observer and Washington Post. As a young man, he spent a year in the United States, where he read The Mind of the South, W.J. Cash’s classic study of the Dixie state of mind. The book made a profound impression. Almost three decades later, Sparks set out to write a similar psycho-history of his own country. The Mind of South Africa is an extremely ...”

“... Harry Truman and the Democrats and expected something for Israel in return. On the other hand, Leonard Garment, a lawyer hired by Israel for the Pollard case, knew which side of his dual loyalties was stronger when he hesitated over his clients’ demands concerning the wording of a legal document. He was asked: ‘What kind of a Jew are you?’ He ...”

“... confession illustrates ‘the compulsive nature of the entries’. No doubt one is forced to over-read these journals, or at any rate the earliest of them, to justify the trouble of copying and commenting on them. There are naturally a few moments when something out of the way, and usually disagreeable, is happening – for example, when members of the family ...”

“... whose swords are symbolic of pens, printing presses, pamphlets. It is perhaps difficult to read Milton’s narrative in Paradise Lost in this way – we visualise the Archangel Michael’s two-handed sword not as the double lever on a printing press, but simply as a sword, while we see ‘chaos’ and the ‘abyss’ physically, as part of outer ...”

“... parents and faculty in Latin. Parents receive a plain copy of the text, which few of them can read. Most of the students can’t read it either. But they receive a different, annotated version. Footnotes, always written in Latin – ‘hic ridete’; ‘hic plaudite’ – identify in-jokes and references to local and ...”

“... put him quite out of court for those linguistic thinkers, the influential Leonard Bloomfield foremost among them, who had set a taboo on Distraction, intensive or otherwise, and saw language as the sum total of real or potential verbal utterances. Where Saussure worked by abstraction, to the hypothesis of linguistic structure, the ...”

“... Meanwhile Banting and Best were ready to attempt a clinical trial of their product on a boy (Leonard Thompson) at the Toronto General Hospital. One of the first people in England to benefit from insulin treatment was a young physician at King’s College Hospital, R.D. Lawrence, who survived to become England’s principal authority on diabetes. The ...”

“... a place in some literary equivalent of Wisden (‘the largest number of multi-volume histories read by a Lancashire cotton-spinner’). And on a few occasions we stumble on episodes that would be more at home in the Alice books or even Monty Python, such as this account of a group of London police constables between the wars: They clubbed together to buy ...”

“... with a dark circle on its edge where the wood had been rubbed smooth. Above it was a notice that read: ‘Please put nothing on the ancient sill. This was the prayer-desk of the anchorites for several centuries.’ I knelt in front of it. If the floor had been at the same height in the medieval period, the desk would have been too high for an anchorite to ...”