“... about him). Norton-Taylor blamed me, with justice, for having scuppered not only Scottish but, more important to him, Welsh devolution. I regarded Norton Taylor as a romantic nationalist – which, as far as I am concerned, is about the lowest rung in the political demonology. A number of journalists have mastered the intricacies of the Belgrano ...”

“... With V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) to his credit so far, Thomas Pynchon, American of no known address, is possibly the most accomplished writer of prose in English since James Joyce. This is not to say that he is also the best novelist, whatever that would mean, but that sentence by sentence he can do more than any novelist of this century with the resources of the English-American language and with the various media by which it is made available to us, everything from coterie slangs to technological jargons, from film to economic history, from comic books to the poetry of T ...”

“... for what it is, a masterpiece. But Crabbe’s work, like that of the contemporary Austrian master Thomas Bernard, is still not widely read. In his own day Crabbe was a famous and distinguished author – the favourite of both Jane Austen and Byron. And while he had two distinct and distinctly successful careers, until the last two decades of his long life he ...”

“... uses it (twice) in All’s well that ends well, the word ‘Puritan’ signifies nothing more than ‘anti-Papist’. In Pericles, it occurs as a straightforward synonym for ‘virtuous’ and even as late as The Winter’s Tale the single ‘puritan’ among the sheep-shearers in Bohemia is no refuser of festivity. He contents himself with fitting ...”

“... took the hint of Byron’s Horatian manner to write the urbane Julian and Maddalo. But, much more important, each brought to fruition in the other a pre-existing style of genius quite opposite to his own. It was Byron’s company, of all things, that seems to have spurred Shelley to write Prometheus Unbound; and it was renewed acquaintance with ...”

“... both twitching at the bang and wail of a microphone being switched on, looking for all the world more the sinners than the sinned against. Me thinking, did you do your own daughter? Beyond the pervasive sense of rottenness – all of Peace’s books carry a distaste that suggests a moralist at work – specific references to the politics of the early ...”

“... options. Yet abusive letters haven’t altogether gone away, and receiving one now might feel even more uncomfortable. You can reply to an email if you choose, or entangle yourself in a Twitterstorm. Or you can block an unwelcome sender. Anonymous letters are different. You can react, but you can’t respond. Whatever the medium, the corrosive sense of ...”

“... make George Gissing’s acquaintance because of it’: which is not so surprising, perhaps, since more than one Gissing scholar has claimed that his novel drew on his relations with Clara, even though it was written before they met. Many of Gissing’s letters to Clara survive, though there is a momentous gap, lamented by Gissing scholars, when she tore up a ...”

“... education secretary, calling for a review of the teaching of history in schools. ‘Nothing is more important to the survival of the British nation,’ he had declared, ‘than an understanding among its young of our shared heritage and the nature of the struggles, foreign and domestic, which have secured our freedoms … a nation which loses sight of its ...”

“... The​ tragedy of Thomas Kuhn’s life was to have written a great book. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was published in 1962, when he was forty, and he spent the rest of his life distressed by its success. It has sold 1.7 million copies, and has been translated into 42 languages. Very few academic books sell in those numbers and scarcely any are still seen as state of the art sixty years after publication ...”

“... later.‘Mappa Mundi’ can be translated as ‘map (or cloth) of the world’. Cloth might be more appropriate because the Mappa isn’t a ‘map’ in the way we would now understand it. It wasn’t made to show you the way to anywhere, except perhaps to heaven. It describes both space and time, biblical history, classical mythology, spiritual ...”

“... By the time he was 34, Thomas Macaulay had had a fellowship at Trinity, practised law for a year or two, sat in the Commons for four, and been appointed to a seat on the Supreme Council in India. On the boat to Calcutta, he wrote to Ellis, he had read the Iliad and the Odyssey, Petrarch, Ariosto, Tasso, Don Quixote, Gibbon on Rome, Sismondi on France, Mill on India, ‘the seven thick folios of Biographica Brittanica’ and ‘the 70 volumes of Voltaire ...”

“... he provided the performance. Partly because of this love of an audience, he has lived a far more public life than most Oxford dons do. So successful was he in this respect that, no doubt to his own pleasure, he was probably not often popularly thought of as an Oxford don. The media have their own not very likeable stereotype of the Oxford don, and Alan ...”

“... offences such as fornication, defamation and adultery, or with disputes between married couples. More important for Shepard’s purposes, they followed civil law procedure, which meant that instead of appearing in court to testify orally (as in criminal trials), witnesses dictated their evidence to clerks. These written accounts now offer social and cultural ...”

“... way of looking at things has been a major theme of recent writing on Byzantine art, not least by Thomas Matthews, who contributes to the catalogue, it’s a pity the exhibition wasn’t curated with it more in mind. Still, there has been no shortage of exhibitions on Byzantium in recent years and doing something different ...”