“... or too vulgar; the food was bad, the company often boring, and there was little to do except hunt; and the servants were frequently dishonest or incompetent, while the nannies were sometimes wicked and tyrannical. In the light of all this, it is not entirely clear why the editor waxes so eloquently angry at the demise of a way of life which, even as ...”

“... and, moreover, are segmented, just as vertebrates are, and tunicate larvae are not. Then, in 1886, William Bateson studied the development of a large mud-dwelling worm, quite unrelated to annelids, named Balanoglossus, and showed that it, too, had pharyngeal gill slits, a dorsal nerve cord and possibly even a notochord – could this be the ancestor of the ...”

“... sport.There is much sniffing, not to say snuffling – and quite a bit of sport – to be found in William Amos’s The Originals: Who’s Really Who in Fiction,† but, like many a hired sleuth before him, Amos feels the need to elevate his labours to the status of an ‘investigation’ or ‘research’: ‘There are those who contend that the ...”

“... there was no statutory control over shotguns until 1968). In 1689, the Bill of Rights presented to William and Mary included, among many rights which were old, one which was new: ‘That the Subjects which are Protestants may have Arms for their Defence suitable to their Condition and as allowed by Law.’ This was the model for the American Bill of Rights of ...”

“... as Henry Kingsley had called Australia, turned into an exploitative hell. This was the time that William Lane formed the New Australia movement which settled some four hundred men, women and children in Paraguay in an attempt to establish a socialist commune. It was into this depression that A.B. Facey was born in Victoria in 1894. Facey’s father set off ...”

“... of his tusks.’ Against this advice one might note the fate of the beater employed by the Nagpur Hunt in 1912, who was knocked to the ground and, despite adopting precisely the attitude prescribed above, was gored so badly that his lungs were exposed. Another unfortunate, in the following year, was gored in a similar way and with similarly fatal results, the ...”

“... to Frederick in 1613, the 16-year-old Elizabeth was observed by German courtiers returning from a hunt, crossbow in hand, having ‘chased the deer after such a fashion that it was marvelled at and in this country even seemed somewhat strange’. Hunting was a family passion. According to his biographer Brennan Pursell, persistence was one of Frederick’s ...”

“... stay for the Christmas festivities before journeying on. The lord shares the bounty of his daily hunt; meanwhile, the lady of the castle tries to seduce Gawain each morning. He honourably refuses to betray his host’s hospitality.On the last day before he is due to face the knight, Gawain partially succumbs to the lady and accepts her girdle, which she ...”

“... memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, was puffed by Moody), David Foster Wallace and William T. Vollmann, Moody spurns the eye-dropper technique of minimalism that was fashionable when he was a nervous colt in the 1980s in favour of a bachelor-guy pack-rat approach where everything the author has ever seen, read, felt or heard on headphones is ...”

“... by Trevor Levere and his Poetry realised in Nature. This is a work of great devotion, involving a hunt for scattered original materials, with extensive use of the products of the University of Toronto, where whole skyscrapers now seem packed with the notes and asides of the lonely schoolboy from Christ’s Hospital. Through his study of the scientific ...”

“... Each appears here in a representative figure: the bibliographer Fredson Bowers and the interpreter William K. Wimsatt. McKenzie singles them out for tactical purposes – that is to say, in order to place each of them at the centre of his double-focused critique of the traditional theory of texts. ‘There is nothing outside of the text.’ That well-known ...”

“... described a public figure as a homosexual, let alone defined him as one, let alone in an obituary. William Rees-Mogg had, apparently, decided that anything less would be anodyne. This same Mogg has written elsewhere of a psychic and political link between Maynard Keynes the homosexual and Keynes the promiscuous debaucher of the currency, tying this in turn to ...”

“... spiritual renewal; a place, too, that has attracted writers like Sean O’Faolain, Denis Devlin, William Carleton and Patrick Kavanagh; a place where the individual might decently ruminate on his relationship with society.This setting affords Seamus Heaney a remarkable opportunity, of which he takes remarkable advantage, to ruminate, not only on his very ...”

“... and the development of an early form of the electroencephalograph. In 1940, a Princeton chemist, William Richards, who had worked in the Tuxedo Park laboratory, committed suicide just before the sensational publication of Brain Waves and Death, a roman à clef he had written based on what was going on at the lab. Even though suicide ran in the family, the ...”

“... a degree of consciousness and concentration which the very best stories don’t seem to have. William Gass rationally observed that the story ‘is a poem grafted onto a sturdier stock’ but Borges decreed that ‘unlike the novel, it may be essential.’ That has an ominous sound. None of these suggestions seems to fit the way in which V.S. Pritchett ...”