“... major collections to have survived the Victorian bonfire. The series has just reached the halfway mark and will probably be completed around 2020. The Carlyle edition, like the concurrent (but bonfire-reduced) Pilgrim Edition of Dickens’s letters, was launched in the optimistic Sixties (the late John Butt was associated with both initiatives). As in ...”

“... first occasion we know about: it was the war that secured the colonists’ independence (1775-83). Mark Urban’s book is about the experiences of one British regiment – the Royal Welch Fusiliers – in that campaign. (Most of them weren’t Welsh, incidentally.) The second war scarcely anyone in Britain has heard of, and even Americans seem to be hazy about ...”

“... in other ways: it provides the first printed mention of the deaths of William Shakespeare and Francis Beaumont, who had died four years before, and is a powerful encomium to paper. Taylor identifies two distinct, magical qualities that paper possesses. On the one hand, paper is ‘th’Eternall Testament of all our Weale’: it enables writers to defeat ...”

“... in America that they can expect poets to be interested in what they are doing. Ashbery, Hollander, Mark Strand, to name only some obvious names, are as passionate and as thoughtful about painting as the poets were in the heyday of Paris. More often than not, their writing is like a healthful antidote to the onanistic garbage that is pumped out by the ...”

“... Elizabeth puts up against her husband, the Man of Wrath. His potato-pickers, she notes, get a mark and a half a day. ‘The women get less, not because they work less, but because they are women and must not be encouraged.’ Her delight in the weather and the forests would go for nothing without her calm, dry, outrageous defence of herself as a ...”

“... Prolonged courtship created the group, and the end of courtship would eventually destroy it. And mark the beginning of middle age too. Still, Delany is at pains to point out that the group broke up well before the beginning of the war, let alone of middle age – which is often held to be responsible for its dispersal. So, as a group, the Neo-Pagans never ...”

“... could step over a puddle. But his career – described with immense care and judiciousness by Mark Nicholls and Penry Williams in what will surely become the standard biography – is still almost unbelievable even when the ornaments of myth are stripped from it. Ralegh started with very little. As a younger son of his father’s third marriage and his ...”

“... distinguishes seduction and predation here) to the sinister (almost everyone is seen as either a mark or an enemy). In 13 chapters of succinct rules this part constitutes a perverse code of proper conduct for the con artist, an anti-ethical ethics for the immoralist: how to stand out or recede as the situation demands; how to get in on a scheme and get out ...”

“... was tempted to regard the scientific romances and humorous journalism with which he had made his mark in the Nineties as little more than dissipations. 1900 was not a peaceful year. From his new house on the cliffs at Sandgate, Wells would have been able to see British troopships heading for South Africa. Elsewhere the great powers were preoccupied with ...”

“... as he escapes to Claridge’s in his private jet. All too single, the dramatic images miss their mark. ‘What, into this?’ The words are those of the king of infinite space up against his nutshell, the ‘etherial spirit of man’ as Carlyle put it, up against ‘two or three feet of sorry tripe full of–’, the voice of whatever it is in us which in ...”

“... of the desert were yellow, biscuit, ash, rose, brick, silvery green, sullen green. Hardly a human mark or scratch was to be seen beyond the mess of the city: but if you went out along the highways you would find at intervals, under bloated plastic and neon signs, all-American strips or zips of hamburger joints, motels, gas-stations and used-car lots. Then ...”

“... pie and strawberries and cream set out to tempt me from the path of wisdom.’ Remarking on this, Mark Girouard has written: ‘One can’t help feeling that Webb would have been a happier man and a greater architect if he had helped himself to more strawberries and cream.’ Happier, perhaps; greater, no. When the braggadocio of Vanbrugh, Nash or Lutyens and ...”

“... been English, but those other mothers, the native nurses and household servants, had left their mark on him. In Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language, Daniel Heller-Roazen recounts a parallel story. Elias Canetti grew up in Bulgaria speaking Ladino, the ‘largely medieval Spanish of the Sephardim’. Bulgarian was the language used by the family ...”

“... Mark Micale’s book opens with a scene from John Huston’s film Freud: The Secret Passion (1962), which re-creates one of Jean-Martin Charcot’s legendary demonstrations of hypnosis before an audience of doctors at the Salpêtrière. With magical ease, Charcot makes two patients’ hysterical symptoms disappear ...”

“... state William Seward drinks too much and blusters about invading Canada; the US ambassador Charles Francis Adams keeps a stiff and chilly distance from London society, managing to seem both unformed and overly formal; the Confederate envoy James Mason says ‘chaw’ for ‘chew’, calls himself ‘Jeems’ and offends British officials with his crude racist ...”