“... remain; you can always have recourse to the landscape, and it will never leave you, though you may leave it. Leaving home and returning are the main narratives. Rivers and roads, the long-distance elements of the landscape, are the geographical refrains of the genre. Williams’s lost highway is a metaphysical condition more than a place, a sort of Dantean ...”

“... well as he did, but understanding how to conduct human relationships was not his strong suit. Lou may have kissed Nietzsche when they were walking together, which was enough to cause him to propose a second time; the first proposal – made the day they met, when he greeted her with ‘What stars have sent us orbiting towards each other?’ – had been, he ...”

“... he reorganised sections of Ibn Battutah’s erratic itinerary, a process that later copyists may inadvertently have continued. Ross Dunn, whose Adventures of Ibn Battutah provides an overview of the historical context of the journeys,* observes that Ibn Battutah was ‘highly unlikely’ to have used extensive travel notes or journals while working with ...”

“... that stay. Out of this arrogance, incompetence and sheer stupidity came a policy failure that may yet beggar the debacle of ...”

“... political references – to, say, the assassination of Rosa Luxemburg, the student uprisings of May 1968, and the deaths of Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof – entirely without contextual comment. Here and there we are told that a work is ‘extraordinary’ or ‘a breakthrough’ without being allowed to see it, as if Gardner or Janson, or Google, can ...”

“... Martha for preventing him from gaining early recognition in the world of medical science. ‘I may here recount, looking back, that it was my fiancée’s fault if I did not become famous in those early years,’ he wrote in his self-portrait. His experiments with cocaine in the 1880s were taken up and elaborated by others. What the late Princess Margaret ...”

“... it, but the sting goes in nevertheless, swift and sharp and surprisingly long-lasting. By mid-May everything was coming up in strips of vivid colour: extremely beautiful, and touching in its intimate scale, like a child’s picture of a farm. Union Square market had reopened and the work shifted gear: faster, harder, suddenly exhilarating. We harvested a ...”

“... for the moment and following intricate rules – will have said what he wanted to say, but he may also have said something he didn’t know he knew. He will have discovered meaning in what he has written, just like his reader. ‘This,’ Mathews writes in ‘For Prizewinners’, a 1982 lecture, ‘is the first way writer and reader participate with one ...”

“... above all because it was not reducible to a set of personal or partisan opinions. Scientists may disagree with one another but, when they do, the appeal on both sides of the argument is to hard facts, and what a relief that was for a man as irascible as Flaubert, who had a serious problem with opinions which lacked the backing of the hard facts that ...”

“... same ‘tough’ new liberals reproduce some of that old left’s worst characteristics. They may see themselves as having migrated to the opposite shore; but they display precisely the same mixture of dogmatic faith and cultural provincialism, not to mention the exuberant enthusiasm for violent political transformation at other people’s expense, that ...”

“... tomorrow.’ The underlying profundity of this remark is a reminder that, while Shaw’s ideas may have begun as jokes, they didn’t end there. In his Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Shaw advocated wages for housework, a slogan which (along with Black Power) was to express a political truth in utopian form more than forty years later. The ...”

“... and whether Holmes seems to be an Oxford or a Cambridge man), but even the most fetishistic fan may not want to know the exact weight of a trout once caught by Conan Doyle’s second wife, or what cut of coat he married her in. Rather as Sexton Blake’s name never appears without the epithet ‘the world-famous detective’, Stashower seems to think that ...”

“... him; she sends a message suggesting that they meet face-to-face, only for JD to reply that ‘it may be time for me to unplug for a while.’ Her final e-mail comes back to her unread (‘I can drop the idea of meeting you; really, consider it dropped’), with the sour warning that their exchange has been interrupted: ‘BAD ADDRESS FILE. MESSAGE ...”

“... headmaster at Repton. ‘Thank you, Your Grace, for your kind advice,’ Macmillan replied. ‘You may have been Dr Ramsey’s headmaster, but you were not mine.’ Some years later, of the Kentish boy, Ted Heath: ‘Hengist and Horsa were very dull people. Now, as you know, they colonised Kent; consequently the people of Kent have ever since been very ...”

“... institutional changes brought about by the Royal Court. Covertly homophobic and misogynistic it may have been, but it was the Court and not the West End which provided a site for the women writers who emerged in the Eighties and many of the young gay male writers who emerged a decade later. And from Tony Kushner’s Angels in America at the beginning of the ...”