“... or just seriously enough: getting involved in the tempo and pressure of the scene’s ultra-thin marks, and seeing in the etcher’s short-cutting certainty (the way the sculptor’s hand is done, for instance, or the scribbled flowers, or the long lines of the curtain, or the throwaway scratches that stand for mattress and bed) enough of pathos, or even of ...”

“... after and financed by big corporations: Shell, BP, ICI, Glaxo, Unilever, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Marks and Spencer. He records that the Committee of Vice-Chancellors decided in 1998 to stop taking money for cancer research from the tobacco industry, but notes that before the ban was imposed Cambridge accepted £1.6m from British American Tobacco to establish ...”

“... she had married a monk, not a king’. Louis had in fact been raised in a monastery. The cleric Stephen of Paris agreed that he ‘was entirely ecclesiastical in his conversation and habits’, though from him that was high praise.Louis’s monkish tendencies became all too apparent during the disastrous Second Crusade of 1147-49. Eleanor herself had taken ...”

“... to demonstrate the superiority of white European settlers. In The Mismeasure of Man (1981), Stephen Jay Gould showed not only that such theories were based on the disproved belief that cranial capacity predicts intelligence, but that the artificially shaped skulls of preserved ancient Peruvians had often been taken to prove they were a naturally ...”

“... anything else, is A Woman’). There are also essays on Scott Fitzgerald, Twain, Emily Brontë, Stephen Crane, Traven’s The Death Ship, and of course Swift. It seems that no book concerned with the idea of the man of letters as man of action is nowadays complete without an essay or two on Swift: an honourable exemplar whose best older celebrants have been ...”

“... Shakespeare isn’t necessarily sympathetic to the conjugal. This decentring of the marriage plot marks an important shift in perceptions of Shakespeare’s position within his culture, and indeed of that culture’s priorities. Rather than being first and foremost a Stratford bourgeois preoccupied with dowries and second-best beds, the Bard who emerges from ...”

“... rather donnish Asian pharmacist is a bit nonplussed and as he serves me I offer to go next door to Marks and Spencer for their security man. But the blonde assistant is pluckily standing her ground. The young man has a really mean face and the pharmacist thinks the best thing is to wait until he goes. Which he is doing when he spots a small woman in her ...”

“... for men. So whereas Bedford’s honours degree in Sports Studies, approved in 1980, in some ways marks a culmination, from the feminist point of view it represents a decline. By looking at her subject through the eyes of a particular organisation, Fletcher is able to paint a revealing picture of how an institution evolves and adapts to its changing ...”

“... howe.’ Some fifty yards further along Carter Lane a curving street slopes down to the left: this marks the eastern boundary of the monastic precinct. It is now called St Andrew’s Hill but in Shakespeare’s day was known less salubriously as Puddle Wharf Lane. Here, straddling the entrance to Ireland Yard, was the gatehouse purchased by Shakespeare in 1613 ...”

“... banking steeply to avoid the pyramidal summit of the Canary Wharf tower, is named in honour of Sir Stephen Redgrave. After hacking through brambles, picking a path around Magellan Boulevard, Atlantis Avenue and a boarded-up missionary hut, I found myself outside the perimeter fence of the steel-grey block of Buhler Sortex Ltd. Two men wearing crisp blue shirts ...”

“... out in more than one long exhausting walk and vigorous playful tussles, was unwearying.’ Leslie Stephen, one of Meredith’s friends, eulogised the effects of an invigorating tramp in the country in the true spirit: ‘You can consume your modest sandwiches, light your pipe, and feel more virtuous, and thoroughly at peace with the universe, than it is easy ...”

“... It is still often proposed that religion and science need not conflict. Stephen Jay Gould held that they occupy ‘non-overlapping magisteria’: science deals with questions of fact, religion with questions of value and meaning. This is wishful thinking, because religions base themselves on factual claims. The god Yahweh promised the land of Canaan to Abraham and his descendants; Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon from golden plates received from the angel Moroni; Jesus of Nazareth is seated at the right hand of the Father, and will return to judge the living and the dead ...”

“... to be the muse of true irony. This biography does useful service, but not much more, bearing the marks of one kind of worthy but unadventurous labour history. If Carpenter is to make sense in a new version, it will only be because he managed, in an actual historical struggle, to combine politics with other things: sexual emancipation, an anarchism not ...”

“... that was a timeless humane truth about the horror of atrocity seeps away.’ The book bears the marks of its origin as a TV series: potted biographies of the founding heroes (Jackson Pollock and Picasso) interpolated here and there, scenic shoots in studios far and wide, and a haphazard structure. It does well, though, to place the Sensation lot in a family ...”

“... is commonly admired for its formal ingenuity. But the ingenuity was there from the beginning; what marks his development is the evolution of what we usually call ‘voice’, the compelling representation of an inner life and its drama. There is no persuasive voice in the early poems, only a grand, epigrammatic impersonality and an empty first person. The ...”