“... was very nervous about its reception; hence the year-long delay in staging it. Anyone who had read the poem (Nijinsky apparently never did) or who knew the gist and had heard Debussy’s astonishing score might well have imagined a ballet of soft flowing languorous movements and fleeting hazy images. But Nijinsky seems rather to have found inspiration in ...”

“... does. She addresses obliquely a single contemporary opponent in matters of law and morality, Judge Richard Posner, a leader of the law and economics movement and a professor of law at Chicago. Intellectually as omnivorous as Nussbaum, as prolific and as well read, Posner came to her lectures and wrote out engaging ...”

“... a quick look at the new find and declared: ‘No great poet has appeared.’ At Cambridge, Sir Richard Jebb thought that while Bacchylides was no eagle, he ought to be praised as a lively nightingale. ‘Students,’ he added, ‘would find his poetry helpful in facilitating their approach to Pindar.’ Bacchylides had been compared with Pindar from the ...”

“... there is no debate and no vote. This leads to administrative absurdities of the kind revealed in Richard Crossman’s diary entry for 20 September 1966, when he was Lord President: ‘The Privy Council is the best example of pure mumbo-jumbo you can find. It is interesting to reflect that four ministers, busy men, all had to take a night and a day off to go ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... that one day, some inconsequential trigger might provoke a breakdown, the way her colleague Richard Shepherd, who worked to identify bodies after the Bali bombings, described in his book Unnatural Causes (2018) being undone by the sound of ice cubes cracking in a glass.Recently Black disclosed her own rape, when she was nine years old, by a transient ...”

“... helmets, and on and on), the dismissive spelling ‘elf n safety’ used by journalists such as Richard Littlejohn to suggest that it’s an infantilising regime run by ignorant jobsworths obscures the fact that since 1975 there has been a reduction of four-fifths in workplace deaths and of well over two-thirds in reported workplace injuries. As SB ...”

“... and hollows’ below. He admired the scene, though not excessively. The naturalists he had read had described ‘submarine grottos decked with a thousand beauties’. This was, he thought, ‘rather exuberant language’. The marine biologist Juli Berwald was more impressed. She describes her first encounter with a coral reef as ‘love at first ...”

“... say, the book of the Talmud in heaven. If it is the same kind of book as the others we typically read every day, is it at any rate compiled from the skins of rams, goats or calves, or from papyrus or the rushes of oriental swamps, or from old strips of rags, or from some perhaps even more common material? In the later 13th century, Italian craftsmen in ...”

“... baby brother, Joshua. At Parsons’s trial, conducted by Governor Endecott, the charge sheet was read again. Confronted with his wife’s allegations, Parsons defended his apparent lack of sorrow at the loss of their children, explaining that he had gone to weep in the fields, so that he wouldn’t seem unmanly or further distress his wife. Asked why she ...”

“... the headstone was still blank. He ‘gave the fellow eighteeen pence’ to cut an inscription. It read simply: ‘O Rare Benn Jonson’. Like the portraitist, Jonson’s biographer has to achieve a kind of dual image. He has to convey Jonson’s huge stature, his pre-eminence as a public literary figure, yet also to reveal something of the private flaws and ...”

“... in the celebrity-packed audience: hands up, she said with customary cruel glee, anyone who has read one of his novels. Bragg, though, had the last laugh with the success of The Maid of Buttermere (1987), a bold and animated retelling of a 19th-century scandal involving the imposter Hatfield. Then, in a neat career reversal, the stir provoked by A Time to ...”

“... figures around the world, including King Hussein of Jordan, President Mobutu, Rajiv Gandhi and Richard Nixon. He is currently on his way to visit ex-President Marcos in Honolulu. He has met Mrs Thatcher several times. Plainly a figure of some significance – and, no doubt, the Observer’s two million readers felt suitably chastened at never having heard ...”

“... the age of 23, during a year spent as assistant master at Reading School under another Jersey man, Richard Valpy. Some months afterwards he took Holy Orders, and, still later, he obtained his BA. Of all the books with which a precocious 23-year-old might burst into print, a standard reference work seems the least likely. Yet Lemprière’s career as a scholar ...”

“... equally conclusively, that formulations in this relativistic style that have been popularised by Richard Rorty, in particular, simply tear themselves apart. If, as Rorty is fond of putting it, the correct description of the world (for us) is a matter of what we find it convenient to say, and if, as Rorty admits, we find it convenient to say that science ...”