“... close to unseating the Kaiser. Nancy Mitford said it was one of the very best novels she had ever read and Evelyn Waugh ‘saluted a new artist’. Proustian in its preoccupation with money and rank, it has the charm of the dying Europe in which it is set: a world where the very rich, when they went to take the cure, travelled in a private railway carriage ...”

“... speak of homology among DNA sequences as easily as among tetrapod fore-limbs) that it is easy to read into Geoffroy’s claims an evolutionary meaning he did not intend. The homologies that he saw, or thought he saw, were as far as he was concerned, placed there by the Creator. It was the age of what would be called Transcendental Anatomy. The Darwinian ...”

“... that doubtless have more to do with my childhood than my professional integrity, I feel obliged to read every word of any book I review, but though I doggedly and probably neurotically followed Dr Cook through all her youthful adventures, I confess to skipping pages and pages devoted to the various horses she owned and her anguish at their individual ...”

“... teacher. Criticism and Ideology (1976), which begins with an attack on Williams, is perhaps best read as a belated result of the student revolution at what Althusserians call the ‘level of theory’. Literary criticism was now to be scuttled in favour of an anti-humanist ‘science of the text’ in which the production of art was dialectically reduced to ...”

“... for women’ versus ‘boats for women’. Enzensberger must have missed it, or we should have read all about it. The feminist dimension is not among the elements of Titanic mythography to which the poem devotes much attention. It is confined to a few bits of lurid bizarrerie: Three cheers for the Countess Rothes in her ...”

“... brutality of a relation brought into the open, unmentionable in that epoch of Brushwood Boys and Peter Pans. Jessie Chambers wrote her own version of events in a novel she called The Rathe Primrose (Milton’s ‘rathe primrose that forsaken dies’) which Frieda found touching and ‘lovable’, while even Lawrence said ‘it wasn’t bad’. This ‘faded ...”

“... Leiris. It has pondered the theory of the sign, foregrounded photography and helped to install Peter Bürger’s 1974 essay ‘Theory of the Avant-Garde’ (translated into English in 1984) as a founding text of alternative cultural criticism. October’s influence on arts professionals has been powerful and lasting, though the editors in feistily refusing ...”

“... chauffeur and footman in fawn livery to pace up and down in formation after lunch. It is sad to read about the day seven chauffeurs mutinied over their treatment by a sneakily parsimonious cook. Two fussy maiden ladies who asked about the cost of stabling their Austin Seven were told ‘If you care to take it up to your bedroom there will be no charge for ...”

“... story of the Enlightenment’s steady diffusion outwards from its Parisian source. In the 1960s, Peter Gay gave them new power in his brilliant extended essay The Enlightenment: An Interpretation. Gay recognised the international dimensions of the Enlightenment, and included Scots, English, Germans and Italians as well as French in what he called the ...”

“... of consciousness, planetary extinction – have become urgent global concerns, a critic like Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker, presumably speaking for a politburo, can still assure his readers that Burroughs ‘wages literary war not on perceptible real-world targets but against suggestions that anyone is responsible for anything’ and that a writer ...”

“... Germany’s foremost living poet. Enzensberger is the most important postwar writer you have never read. He was born in 1929 in the Bavarian town of Kaufbeuren. His father was a post office bureaucrat with expertise in radio and telecommunications, aspects of a burgeoning modernity that would engage the interest of his eldest son. Expelled from the Hitler ...”

“... work carried out in other countries’. He had studied in Germany before the First World War, and read and spoke German; he had also visited England and met English economic historians; and he was the author of a major, synoptic analysis of Feudal Society, first published in 1939 and finally translated into English in 1961, as well as a study of the ‘royal ...”

“... mature to be ruled by a secular left. Opposed to one another though they are, all these versions read the Iranian protests as a conflict between Islamic hardliners and pro-Western liberal reformists. That is why they find it so difficult to locate Mousavi: is he a Western-backed reformer who wants to increase people’s freedom and introduce a market ...”

“... Old One. It is generous of Wade not to ridicule this. Like most romantic rituals, it is hard to read about without wincing: ‘The OO commands me to send a wave of his paw’ and so on. Mirrlees has been blamed for encouraging Harrison to destroy her papers. Wade doesn’t agonise too much over the reasons for this. It is easy to assume that, along with the ...”

“... pioneering work of Samuel Johnson, and rival the efforts of 19th-century European lexicographers. Peter Gilliver, in The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (2016), characterises the movement that led to the formalisation of the Philological Society’s proposals as ‘a groundswell of what might be called lexicographic nationalism’, and the OED has ...”