“... quite suddenly, as I was looking for something else in the back pages of the impeccably learned (read: dry as dust) Review of English Studies for July 1949, there he was: ‘Frank Kermode’. Not, I was interested to note, ‘J.F. Kermode’ or any other variant that signalled the first name he never used. (It was one of the lesser indignities of his time in ...”

“... is a legal system in tatters.One apparently minor but actually serious event flagged up by SB is Peter Hain’s outing, under the shelter of parliamentary privilege, of Philip Green as the beneficiary of a court order giving temporary anonymity in a current case. MPs and peers – and certainly Lord Hain – know that the 1689 Bill of Rights, by barring the ...”

“... was particularly unimpressed by an unnaturally informative cloth label pasted to the back, which read: ‘Shakspere/Born April 23 = 1564/Died April 23 – 1616/Aged 52/This Likeness taken 1603/Age at that time 39 ys.’ Spielmann doesn’t say so, but it’s hard not to suspect that this label was written to overcompensate for that missing two-inch ...”

“... his bleeding face, and if we are as severe as these editors, and if we want to keep that moment (Peter Brook, for example, didn’t), we have really to accept a version of the play that lacks over a hundred lines found only in the Folio. The General Introduction ably defends these editorial principles, and along the way gives a very lucid and engaging ...”

“... than their normal 33 per cent discount. The target audience, then, was not the common readers who read common novels, and the common shops which supplied them, but collectors of rare books, and, more importantly, dealers in rare books, some of whom would hold back copies until the edition had been exhausted and its market value had risen accordingly. The ...”

“... In the morning Frederick would walk to the Royal Torbay Yacht Club, drink a glass of sherry, read the newspapers and walk home for luncheon. In the afternoon he would walk back to the club and weigh himself. He died in 1901, leaving the family financially embarrassed. Clara preserved his last letter, the order of service from his funeral, some beech ...”

“... near the hearth, handy for pulling a volume out and leaning against the mantelpiece while he read a soulful passage’), and Lamming is more interested in old Lawson’s relationship with two women, his housekeeper and the intruding Moira Gelling. Of the two, Gelling is supposed to be the more intriguing, a spoilt middle-aged pussycat who has ...”

“... Paul Foot, now its politics are rightish, its stance prurient, and its key figures Nigel Dempster, Peter McKay and Auberon Waugh. The radical lampoon has become required reading on the magazine syllabus of every Sloane Ranger. Moreover, the Eye, that fearless exposer of the faintest mafia, now runs a comfortable little establishment of its own. Consider how ...”

“... that chapter 29 of Magna Carta rose to near scriptural status: ‘No freeman [for which now read person] shall be … exiled, or any other wise destroyed … but by lawful judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land.’ Baker points out the potential relevance of this still-extant provision to the Chagos islanders’ litigation, in which it formed ...”

“... And looking beyond the limits of this collection, what about Count Metternich (not to speak of Peter Mandelson, who is invoked, perhaps not altogether seriously, in the publisher’s press release)? ‘The World of the Favourite’ appears to be a piece of string which can be stretched so far that it turns into fairly useless elastic. It was also a ...”

“... age group and because younger women have denser breast tissue, which makes mammograms harder to read.) In a mammogram the contrast is between fat, which is more or less transparent to X-rays, and other tissues, which appear either as overlapping fibrous strands or as a dense cloud. These form a complex background against which the signs of cancer must be ...”

“... cultural delegates in 1954 had been involved in these events as young men, and most of them had read Edgar Snow’s hugely influential – and partisan – Red Star over China, published by the Left Book Club in 1937. Wright suggests that Snow’s book and the journalism of Agnes Smedley accounted for just about everything these travellers knew about modern ...”

“... and outrageously reactionary fantasist at the Daily Telegraph, who wrote under the pseudonym Peter Simple. Yet Wharton’s attempts to ridicule the enemies of Unionism were funny precisely because they drew on received assumptions about both Unionists and liberals. Among the most memorable creations in his gallery of bien-pensant absurdity was the trendy ...”

“... placard, shading in the letters of a message that she later tied to one of the crowd barriers. It read, very roughly: Thank you, Assange, for giving us a history of the vanquished. She was thinking of something by Brecht, she said, or possibly Walter Benjamin. An older, more eccentric figure assured me that Assange had sneaked away from the embassy the week ...”

“... advocate of this view; and ‘countless paintings, particularly genre scenes, had to be “read” in a manner comparable to studying riddles and rebuses.’ The untutored eye might see only a group of men and women eating, drinking and music-making; but the educated viewer would recognise in a Merry Company an allegory of the five senses and ...”