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“... read about the murder that week, on the day he finished a biography of the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, Emmanuel Carrère, writer, père de famille, and Romand’s contemporary, finally decided that the only person who could answer the questions that had begun to trouble him was Romand himself. Six months after the murders he wrote to Romand in ...”

“... concealed inside an early Elizabethan ring which once belonged to Winston Churchill. It was Sir Philip Sidney who said (not with Anne in mind but her daughter), ‘she was a queen and therefore beautiful,’ and much diplomatic comment on her exquisite good looks can be dismissed along with the misattributed portraits. There seems little doubt that she had ...”

“... by her. Particularly by her claim that she didn’t see the point of making things up: that she drew on her family and childhood for her early novels and historical data for her later work. He overdoes it. He often seems to be fighting an imaginary adversary: a reader who thinks that fiction is a code, who opens a novel and gets cross if an autobiography ...”

“... fairytale trappings still hinder its restoration to the pre-modern intellectual mainstream. In Philip Pullman’s Lyra’s Oxford (2003), Sebastian Makepeace slaves away in ‘a hot, close, sulphurous room lit only by the flames of a great iron furnace in one corner. Benches along each wall were laden with glass beakers and retorts, with crucibles and sets ...”

“... and gave her name to the modified milk bottle in which donated blood was stored. Another, Charles Drew, Columbia’s first African American medical graduate, built the infrastructure for plasma collection in the US for shipment to the various theatres of war. At a time when black blood was acceptable only when specifically labelled pint by pint, and was ...”

“... had Lincoln not been assassinated, or Bobby Kennedy – or more sombre fantasies, like Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle, in which Germany and Japan win the Second World War and divide the US between them. But these historical variants are not genuine time-travel narratives on the order of H.G. Wells’s Time Machine (1895), which ...”

“... reworked by later authors, the subject could also be approached as a history of reception. Philip Hardie’s impressively learned Celestial Aspirations touches on all these aspects, with an emphasis on reception history. As a Latinist, he is interested in the long afterlife of classical myths, themes and images of celestial ascent, and traces them ...”

“... they serve only the luxury end of the market. The equivalent of the Grand Tourists whom Ingres drew in Rome now have their own cameras and portraiture’s death by a million snapshots has freed painters from the burden of face-painting about which they so often complained. The trouble is finding another genre which can make the same demands on the ...”

“... they could not engage in autonomous acts: at this time Dean Rusk, one of the two men who drew the line through the middle of Korea in 1945, was calling China ‘a Slavic Manchukuo’. The publication of Khrushchev’s memoirs in 1971 seemed to clinch the Russian involvement. The memoirs state flatly that the Korean Communist leader Kim Il Sung came ...”

“... manifestations of the politics of immiseration. Nehru’s short-lived successor, Shastri, drew strength from the crisis of fresh hostilities with Pakistan in 1965. When he collapsed from a heart attack after completing the peace negotiations at Tashkent, it was to Nehru’s daughter that the equally-matched rivals turned for an amenable compromise ...”

“... of what Castiglione meant, though he does identify the ancient and medieval source from which he drew his ideals, his terminology, the larger shape and many smaller passages of his work. For meaning, Burke substitutes reception: not what Castiglione had in mind but what his readers found in him. Burke argues, convincingly, that watching a succession of ...”

“... mortality was linked to the day of your birth. I was playing hearts in the student union when they drew the numbers. Mine turned out to be 254. It was widely figured they’d never draft past number 150. I was to be spared. I had a future. I wanted to be a poet. I had discovered Yeats. I wanted to be Simon and Garfunkel. I could play the guitar. I considered ...”

“... agents who marketed them. (The identity of its members remains unknown.)All of this activism drew strength from a larger cultural revival. Welsh publishing houses and record labels sprang up, along with Welsh bands, some achieving major national and international success. There was a renewed sense of cultural confidence, even when – or especially when ...”

“... epic in the register of the humdrum, a tendency Heaney once neatly characterised by saying, ‘if Philip Larkin had ever composed his version of The Divine Comedy he would probably have discovered himself not in a dark wood but a railway tunnel halfway on a journey down England.’ That domestication of epic, in which allusions to heroic fictions at once give ...”

“... became clearer, and for some much harder to bear. One sad early case was the naturalist Philip Gosse, the father of Edmund Gosse, who was known in the 1850s as the bestselling author of The Aquarium, which started yet another popular craze – for keeping fish. Gosse was a devout member of the austere Nonconformist Plymouth Brethren. Just before On ...”