“... desired to live.’ If we are willing to follow this cue, we instantly discover a more coherent reading: Cleopatra indeed makes a great show of rendering Caesar a complete account of her possessions and Seleucus indeed makes humiliating nonsense of her grand profession; Cleopatra’s words are exploded but Cleopatra herself is far from being ...”

“... on its tracks. Twenty-five years ago, addressing a Past and Present conference not long before Peter Laslett published The world we have lost, Keith Thomas declared: ‘The study of the family in English history has simply not begun.’ Today it is an activity for tens of thousands of people. In the primary schools it competes with Norman castles and Saxon ...”

“... was to be estranged from her ominous father. There she once sat in some sort of castle, or not, reading, for sure, the literature of Romanticism, and growing up to resemble – in the opinion of the writer’s aunt, the historian C.B.A. Behrens – a character out of Lermontov. Lermontov, for his part, was a character out of Byron, and so was Pechorin, the ...”

“... sees his mother and father and brother again. The Germans shoot Mr and Mrs Steenwijk and their son Peter and burn down their house, because Fake Ploeg, chief inspector of the Haarlem police, has been found dead outside their front door. The Germans also shoot 29 Communists. It is the Communists who have assassinated Ploeg, and the body originally lay outside ...”

“... of Lamarck. The point that Desmond brings out so well – drawing on the work of Martin Rudwick, Peter Bowler and Michael Bartholomew – is that Darwin’s Origin of Species actually caught Huxley on the wrong foot. If the future of scientific naturalism was, after all, to be bound up with an evolutionary theory, there was a respect in which Huxley had ...”

“... trickery.Yet (in England, at least) – ubi sunt? For the last three months I’ve been reading books of poems submitted for review to the London Review. With the exception of a few amused parodies and the odd Waddington-style coelocanth, none show any trace of being haunted by the bogies of ’72. Studying the work of writers aged between 30 and ...”

“... novel about an 18th-century naval adventurer’.Hill’s attention had been caught by a chance reading of The Golden Ocean (1956), a novel for teenagers which made it clear that O’Brian knew his way around the age of sail. He had inserted two fictional Irish heroes into George Anson’s voyage around the world in the 1740s, and could do 18th-century ...”

“... what he defined as a ‘moral’ authority. To attack them was to prefer a corrosive scepticism to reading rigorously. He pointed out that he could use the critics’ own methods to ‘attack and reject the Pythagoreans, Platonists, and the writings of all the ancients, indeed Holy Scripture itself, and the books of all good authors. This presumption and ...”

“... in it (not even in his suicide); this person whose books I briefly thought I wouldn’t mind reading, before, while setting down the umpteenth of them amid groans (it was the novella Confusion), adding the stipulation to myself: yes, but only if they’d been written by someone else.Stefan Zweig just tastes fake. He’s the Pepsi of Austrian writing. He ...”

“... of the Mill’. He at once, without any hesitation, announced that he agreed with your reading of it. He was not content with announcing his own opinion, but evidently set to work to find internal evidence to support it. Yesterday he came again and read us a passage from Graham Balfour’s life of RLS … I think you have the life so I didn’t ...”

“... imaginary woodlands, developing and expanding material from earlier lectures and essays. As Peter Holland’s eloquent afterword reminds us, Barton’s interest in the topic had first been excited by her reading of Ben Jonson’s Robin Hood play, The Sad Shepherd, for her monograph on Shakespeare’s great ...”

“... chemical nature of the planet, some may involve feedback that helps life itself to continue,’ Peter Godfrey-Smith wrote in the LRB of 19 February 2015. ‘If they come about, they do so as fortuitous by-products of the evolution of particular living things.’ Andrew Watson, the co-creator of Daisyworld, later distanced himself from Lovelock’s ...”

“... Corbyn’s election as Labour leader, the Brexit vote), responds to the books he’s reading and to what’s in the papers, as well as occasionally registering very beautifully the changing seasons in his garden and, somewhere in the background, the progress of the church year. Parts of the poem are movingly autobiographical, full of elegiac ...”

“... writings.1957 was the year I should have come down from Oxford but didn’t and one thing I think reading this tosh is that if I hadn’t got a First (the circumstances undescribed in the diary) I would never have picked myself up to do much except possibly teach – and teach badly. It was the fairly spurious self-confidence I got from this fluke ...”

“... Netta unconsciously lusts after Hitler and occasionally goes to bed with her Fascist friend Peter, a nastily moustached man who’s served time in prison for fatally running over a pedestrian while drunk. Unknown to her, Bone has a split personality – a darkly humorous plot device that comes across as an exaggeration of a blackout-prone drinker’s ...”