“... in the printing trade. The bulk of the forgeries were manufactured by the eminently respectable Richard Clay and Sons. The firm cannot, over a period of twenty years, have turned out a hundred or so piracies and ‘creative forgeries’ without someone noticing that their work was circulating in the second-hand market under false colours and at hugely ...”

“... as if with an eye to leaving a crisp morsel for the historian. In his 1974 biography of Pepys, Richard Ollard said that there clings to him ‘an irresistible air of bedroom farce’, with ‘furtive lecheries so vivaciously pursued’. The earlier multi-volume life by Sir Arthur Bryant had done much to rescue him from his popular reputation of Slippery ...”

“... an infuriating wallflower, eavesdropping on the glorious beauty of Shelley’s marriage to Mary. Richard Holmes’s unsurpassable biography, Shelley: The Pursuit, written in the ‘golden years’ of the early Seventies, was the first to rescue Claire from the patronage of the Shelley-worshippers and to introduce her as a political thinker, who not only ...”

“... in a quite unprecedented way on their right to pass judgment on the deeds of important dead white males, and to tell and publish the story of the polities that they lived in. Bridget Hill neglects this broader intellectual context for a more narrowly biographical approach in this study of Catharine Macaulay, but hers is still a considerable achievement ...”

“... studied. In our day, the political bias has resurfaced in the racist hypotheses and conclusions of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve. One of the twins in Neubauer’s study later remarked, ‘This is nightmarish, Nazi shit,’ while the psychiatrist involved in the study confessed: ‘In those days we were playing God.’ Satan, I’d ...”

“... precision. This, coupled with the memoir form, put me oddly in mind of a book by his contemporary, Richard Rayner. The Blue Suit is also a coming-of-age work with an Oxbridge protagonist and intelligence recruiters in the wings; the two books even mention the same superstar literature don (I shall call him ‘George’, since that is his name). And both, for ...”

“... show how durable that change has been, he could have pointed to today’s exemplars of this ideal: Richard Layard’s Wellbeing Programme at the LSE, for instance, which makes the case for measuring national happiness alongside calculations of GDP.National happiness, of course, is a difficult thing to recognise, let alone measure, and it isn’t always clear ...”

“... But the same is true of manuscripts.Cotton may not have known what he had. His librarian, Richard James, labelled the manuscript: ‘Vetus poema Anglicanum in quo sub insomnii figmento multa ad religionem et mores spectantia explicantur’ (a poem in old English explaining many religious and moral topics using the figure of the dream). It was not ...”

“... by Indian cooks in which ‘many condiments of different flavours’ were blended.In 1845, Edmund White, the author of another cookery book, wrote that a British curry was ‘nothing more than a bad stew’. The spice mix was not tempered or fried, but thrown raw over the stock or water. To make matters worse, these stews were thickened with a flour ...”

“... to accommodate genes and mutations, recent work has been more challenging. Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, for example, used the spandrels of St Mark’s in Venice, which exist as a necessary by-product of the process of mounting a dome on rounded arches, as a way of illustrating the anti-adaptationist idea that certain features of organisms have ...”

“... viewer’s superior TV-knowingness. ‘Image-Fiction’, as he called the progeny of DeLillo’s White Noise (1985), was in danger of becoming similarly tainted. Though ostensibly aimed at ‘reimagining what human life might truly be like over there across the chasms of illusion, mediation, demographics, marketing, imago and appearance’, it ‘most often ...”

“... The trashy references he fills his work with are like scraps torn from magazines, the rough white paper edges proudly out on show: the toothpaste ad in the decision to call his current heroine ‘Susan Colgate’; wrappers, video grabs, an Andy Warhol detail on ‘another American town that bought Tide, ate Campbell’s soup and generated at least one ...”

“... makes his favourite writers sound rather like a squad of marines, or weekend hikers. Writing about Richard Eberhart in 1960, for example, he claimed that ‘Eberhart ... is a prolific writer, so the metaphysical pieces may merely be poetic callisthenics to keep him fit until his next burst of creative energy.’ Of Hugh MacDiarmid in 1962: ‘He has managed a ...”

“... as self-reliant, smart and funny. Just when you’ve had more than enough reflections on why Richard Dawkins is probably, unhelpfully, right, Mrs Barnes steps in with a put-down. As an adolescent I once hid a tape recorder under the table during dinner in an attempt to prove that, far from it being the ‘social event’ my mother decreed every meal ...”

“... to the left of the headword. Murray’s successors William Craigie and Charles Onions tussled over whether to maintain this practice. Proofs of the Supplement dated 11 September 1929 retain Murray’s so-called tramlines; in the next proofs, dated 2 July 1930, they are gone. Between these dates, Onions joined the BBC Advisory Committee on Spoken English, where he became acutely aware of the prejudices that led some people to stigmatise new or imported terms; tramlines, he felt, didn’t help ...”