“... trick also licensed comparatively plain language, arhythmia and absence of rhyme in the manner of Christopher Reid’s pseudo-translations from a supposedly Eastern European language, Katerina Brac (1985). A further twist is introduced in God’s Gift to Women by ‘Candlebird’ (‘after’ the eighth-century Arabic poet Abbas Ibn al-Ahnaf), where a lover ...”

“... with barely a second glance: the courtier MP William Collier and the theatrical impresario Christopher Rich, for instance, whose battle for control of Drury Lane Hill briefly blundered into in 1711; or the women writers such as Eliza Haywood and Martha Fowke, alias ‘Clio’, who were part of the literary circle that formed around Hill in the early ...”

“... country that had taken in the refugee from Nazi Austria. Someone had to counter the flab and dead wood, and there was at that time no denunciation from within. Nevertheless, it’s possible to feel that the energy of aggression, the sheer blood-lust, was in excess of the necessary. There is a parallel with Leavis: an outsider (though native-born) equally ...”

“... its Degas, Delacroix and Toulouse-Lautrecs, its ‘James Bond’ features and 17th-century olive-wood panelling? Who else was an object of some interest to Mick Jagger, François Mitterrand and Greta Garbo, to Gorbachev, Judy Garland – ‘Rudi’, ‘Judy’, ‘Rudi’, ‘Judy’ – and François Truffaut? And, among those who were, who was also ...”

“... of the master mason John Wastell sits in harmony with later Flemish stained glass and French wood carving, embellished with classical motifs. It is Gothic going on Renaissance. Instead, cut off from Continental influence, after the initial hiatus, the story of architecture in Britain and Ireland over the next three centuries took a different direction ...”

“... should not be taken to suggest any idea of shortness. Fludd’s writings, said Anthony à Wood, sounding rather daunted, ‘were great, many and mystical’. His magnum opus was the Utriusque Cosmi Historia, which offered nothing less than a ‘technical, physical and metaphysical history of the macrocosm and the microcosm’. This appeared in parts ...”

“... with Willard Libby’s demonstration around 1950 that uncontaminated organic materials, notably wood, were testable for loss of radioactivity and, thus tested, could provide approximately accurate dates for the previously undatable. It seems not too much to say that this discovery produced a revolution in African archaeology where manifestly ancient but ...”

“... correspondence generated by her unfavourable review of The Official Foodie Handbook in 1985, Christopher Driver made pointed reference to her ‘perpetually forthcoming’ review of his own work. The postcards that punctuate the book, each one the occasion for an excursion by Clapp into biography or reminiscence, are also sometimes laconic, even for ...”

“... descriptions, the corrector sounds like some combination of child genius, automaton and loyal dog. Christopher Plantin praised his son-in-law’s potential for correcting because he has never been passionately interested in anything so much as the study of the Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Chaldean, Syriac and Arabic tongues (in which those who confer with him ...”

“... wrote seven novels. He wasn’t satisfied with the first few. The one he likes least, In a Yellow Wood (1947), was written when he was briefly an editor at a New York publishing house, and is about a man presented with a choice between the office and life. He thinks his authorial voice didn’t properly appear until The Judgment of Paris (1952), a tale of an ...”

“... its shuttered finish. This was painstaking: ‘Air bubbles which naturally cling to the rough wood texture needed to be knocked loose by vibrating the wet concrete mechanically after it was poured but before it set, but not too vigorously: over-vibrating concrete would shake the gravel to the bottom.’ He finds that even John Betjeman, the ...”

“... his tutors telling him that the man in the street, a naive realist, ‘never/Can see the wood for the trees’. ‘I never thought,’ MacNeice reflected, ‘that I should/Be telling them vice-versa/ That they can’t see the trees for the wood.’ MacNeice, who spoke so witheringly of what he called ...”

“... and political. Shortly after the Royal Society was founded in 1660, its leaders asked Petty and Christopher Wren ‘to consider the philosophy of shipping’, and the king himself urged Petty to turn his mind to naval matters. The mix of science and statecraft was compelling: Petty got down to work straight away. He wrote to the king, saying that ‘there ...”

“... His arrival at Harvard brought on homesickness and haemorrhoids. He roomed for three years with Christopher Lasch, later the social historian who wrote The Culture of Narcissism (of which Updike was arguably an exemplar; certainly many of his characters were, particularly Harry Angstrom). Begley quotes Lasch’s letters home about his roommate: ‘None of ...”

“... of England from Elizabeth’s reign to the outbreak of the Civil War. Its thesis often echoes Christopher Hill’s work on Puritanism and the more recent suggestions of Keith Wrightson, but Hunt finds a voice of his own. His concern is with ‘social puritanism’: with the ‘interpenetration’ of the ‘material and ideological causes’ of the Puritan ...”