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“... Lecky and new-wave social science, the scatological treatment of Thomas Carlyle. Other omissions may be added. Frederic Maitland is not very well realised, which is strange given the historians (Kenyon among them) who believe in his greatness. Maitland’s relationship with Leslie Stephen and avid interest in Meredith’s novels would appear to be precisely ...”

“... of writing from the US that the then editor Bill Buford labelled ‘dirty realism’, taking in Richard Ford, Raymond Carver, Bobbi Ann Mason and so on), has always belonged to her and her alone. ‘For me,’ she has written, this ‘no man’s land, a deeply specific isolation drenched in family stories and secrets, is a huge advantage for a ...”

“... tentatively, allowing his idol and besotted patron first dibs on divining the future – which may prove to be less golden than the sun’s shafts seem to promise. What if the guide has lost his touch, can no longer read the entrails? Speer’s detachment and poised ambiguity were not entirely affectations. He was a provincial snob who regarded ...”

“... brats. ‘She had 2 Bastards, others say Three,’ Pope adds in a manuscript comment that he may have had from the struggling poet and hellraiser Richard Savage. In typically tantalising style, Curll alleged in print that the ill-matched babes were ‘Offspring of a Poet and a Bookseller’. The first task for any ...”

“... writ, in response to what they saw as Protestant fundamentalism. As the French Oratorian scholar Richard Simon remarked early on in a book that became a subversive classic among Catholics and Protestants alike, ‘the Books of the Bible that are come into our hands are but abridgments of the ancient Records, which were more full and copious, before the last ...”

“... Toft was suffering a violent and protracted miscarriage. But what exactly had she miscarried? It may have been a malformed placenta or foetus, or, as Karen Harvey suggests, a teratoma – a tumour containing bones, tissues, hair, teeth and flesh that can develop anywhere in the body.Whatever came out of Mary Toft after that long day in the fields, it seems ...”

“... is surely needed. The tone of dedications and letters soliciting patronage from potentates may strike us as embarrassing, but their language was surely well understood as conventional. You wouldn’t write so when sending a manuscript to a publisher or even applying to the Arts Council for a grant, but in either case you would do appropriately what ...”

“... the ceremony would be ‘inconvenient’. Senna, a young Brazilian woman told the Independent’s Richard Williams, ‘was our hero. Our only one.’ Senna’s triumph, like Pele’s before him, was to have beaten the North at one of its own games. And the North, angry Brazilians wanted to believe, had killed him. A million or so of Sao Paulo’s 15 million ...”

“... logo of the Pebble Beach Company. As such, the use of the tree’s image is regulated by law. It may not be photographed or reproduced for any commercial purpose.” ’ This dismaying parable epitomises Coates’s chief contention, that nature itself is something we rarely encounter now. What we pass through, and plough or chop down, and photograph or paint ...”

“... Unionist politics at the time. Building on the foundations that he has laid, three further lines may, perhaps, be suggested. Politically, the link between tariff reform and the Liberal Party needs further exploration – and the link with the Labour Party, too, if one thinks of Blatchford. Grayson and the British Socialist Party. Despite its title, this book ...”

“... wrong. Although he correctly predicted the dates for the major offensives in the West in April and May 1940, he had several times cried wolf before that. This was not Oster’s fault – Hitler’s personal whim or unfavourable weather caused the cancellation of several intended attacks – but one can hardly blame the politicians and civil servants who ...”

“... be disappointed if he had not also read Lucas and Koss. The presence of Koss’s monumental volume may have led Miss Brown to compress her own volume into smaller compass than she might otherwise have allowed, for Koss himself thanked her in his introduction. In a curious way, however, the books are complementary, not competitive, with Miss Brown’s far ...”

“... and presided over, the Socratic ‘entirely as a sacrificial duty, and loathed it’. This may well be an exaggeration, since Lewis appears to have enjoyed above everything else occasions giving scope to the rapid cut and thrust of spoken controversy. John Lawlor, another pupil, has recorded that argument was the only form of conversation ever employed ...”

“... to persecute as others have persecuted Jews and Negroes. Lord Arran, House of Lords, 12 May 1965 Producing a documentary to mark the 30th anniversary of the legalisation of homosexuality, I was struck by the very Victorian restrictions on the lives of gay men in the Sixties. Victim, the film in which Dirk Bogarde plays a married barrister ...”

“... personal physician, we know that he will not be adequate in any way to meet the surprises that may lie ahead. There is a vacancy in him, a hollow that we know will be filled up by the overflowing charisma of what he calls ‘the number one id’. Garrigan’s new master is six foot six inches tall and weighs 20 stone. He is in the rudest of health. There ...”