“... was only perfunctorily chased in England, it seems (according to a recent study by Robert W. Smith) that this was partly due to an assumption among the élite that the optical discovery ought to be the property of Cambridge, the director of whose observatory, James Challis, however, trailed his feet rather than trained his eyes. Because Le Verrier had ...”

“... from her white family before she died in 1870, ten years after she was recaptured. When Coho Smith, himself a former captive, visited Naudah in east Texas and spoke to her in Comanche, she screamed and threw herself at his feet, begging to be taken home. When Smith refused, she told him that her heart was always crying ...”

“... made him see red. Jews and the high finance.’Buchan’s biographers, starting with Janet Adam Smith in 1965, tend to hold up this turnaround as evidence that he wasn’t an antisemite. They point to his handful of Jewish friends, to his Zionism – a cause he learned about from his friend Arthur Balfour, who set him on the path of writing thrillers by ...”

“... Unitarian sort of poem, it is nevertheless useful to be reminded by McCarthy that Barbauld drew at least as much on other religious and poetic traditions of the earlier 18th century, especially the philologist-philosopher James Harris and the poet James Thomson, author of The Seasons. Actually, it might be truer to say that Barbauld’s most remarkable ...”

“... under their feet. But it is hard not to speculate about what might have been different had John Smith lived to become prime minister in Blair’s stead. Whether you approve of it or not, Blair’s success in outflanking the traditional party of the right from within the traditional party of the left was achieved with remarkable rhetorical and political ...”

“... might have it – found the persistence of such unruly quarters quaint and charming, and headlines drew on misplaced nostalgia for the age of cowboys and Indians. On the other hand, new technology was employed both in the commission and investigation of crimes. It was possible, by the 1920s, to eavesdrop on criminals using electronic listening devices; their ...”

“... knew how rather than why; and her daughters no doubt unconsciously supplied the information she drew on almost equally unconsciously. The understanding seems to claim an inevitability which the tale actually lacked, for George Smith of the Cornhill applied his guillotine by only allowing it a limited number of issues, at ...”

“... music has also stormed the citadel of literary fiction, and characters in novels such as Karline Smith’s Moss Side Massive and Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity are identified, and minutely differentiated, by their music tastes. The characters in The Black Album tend not to be pinned down by their music tastes. Chili, the central character’s brother, is, in ...”

“... someone will feel compelled to publish a good novel.’In July 1964 someone, in the shape of Cork Smith, an editor at Viking, was sufficiently compelled to offer Williams a contract. The novel was published as Stoner, after its central character, the following April, and was ‘briefly noted’ in the New Yorker. It sold around 1700 copies: those who wanted ...”

“... the beginning was a playground, and at times perhaps a refuge, in which she created characters and drew a narrative thread through the random events of everyday life. In the earliest letters, written to her friend Hugh Lee in 1939 when she was working at Punch, her laconic colleague, the ‘subeditor from Lowestoft’ with his pipe, his ‘permanent ...”

“... gave him; and Holofernes had been drinking heavily, which made Judith’s task easier. Cleopatra drew a knife on the messenger who brought news of Antony’s marriage, but he skipped off. ‘These hands do lack nobility,’ she then reproached herself, ‘that they strike a meaner than myself’: also she wanted the messenger alive, to hear from him that ...”

“... its strength: the picturesque and illustrative, as required by grand opera on the Parisian model, drew from him some of his most dubious pages, like the ‘Rataplan’ in La Forza del Destino and rather a lot of Les Vêpres Siciliennes. His crowning work for Paris, Don Carlos, is about the wreck of generous feeling on the asperities of power rather than about ...”

“... Eliot’s word. She had a little more time for Comte than Stephen had, though, as Annan shows, he drew some important un-Comtean conclusions from his study of the great systematiser. No more than Harrison did Stephen want the general arrangement of society to be unduly disturbed. He had the conscience and the industry, but also required the privileges, proper ...”

“... waiting on the steps for the taxi that would take our speaker to the railway station. As the taxi drew up, he turned to me and said: ‘Votes of thanks are notoriously difficult to do and I think you did it superbly.’ This kind gesture to someone very unimportant, in circumstances where most people would have stayed chatting up their intellectual peers, was ...”