“... 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 ...”

“... deeply embarrassing letter telling him how much I admired him’. The letter was intended to be read ‘in the event of my pre-decease’. Even as Bron penned it, though, Evelyn was telling Diana Cooper that he had no plans to fly out to his stricken son – unless the boy died, of course, in which event he might feel obliged to put in an appearance. The ...”

“... in which the leading Whig magnates have been portrayed as industrious, responsible, widely-read statesmen working to a serious reform agenda. Even before Gladstone had committed himself to the Liberal Party – or so many historians now believe – the Whig-dominated Ministries of the mid-Victorian period were pursuing authentically Liberal ...”

“... from the English Faculty Library at Cambridge. It would fall due and I would renew it. I must have read it quite literally hundreds of times – and everyone else not at all! ‘No one shaved, and only the turtle washed,’ as Lowell said of the turtle in the bathtub. I discovered Hamilton, I suppose, and should explain, in the place of honour at the end of ...”

“... yellow sands’, in which a succession of voices discourse on the fairy painter and parricide Richard Dadd (odd that no one comments on the singular aptness of his surname). Dadd, having taken his father for the devil, went at him in Cobham Park with a spring-knife – a weapon more effective than Christy Mahon’s loy. Poor dad – or, if you like, poor ...”

“... classifies as immediately obvious. A truth-condition theorist should not say that one can simply read off the correct substantive account of understanding a particular expression from its truth-theoretic clause. His position should rather be that the correct substantive account – an account of what Harman would call its conceptual role – determines its ...”

“... forums with a couple of dozen other stalwarts to listen to them – the likes of Séamus Healy, Richard Boyd Barrett and Thomas Pringle, all now catapulted into the Dáil with a mandate to disturb the political peace. While the Fianna Fáil aristocracy were punching their cards at local meetings and stealthily ascending the party ladder, these newcomers ...”

“... as your husband fucks another woman. Enright’s short stories are some of the most furious I’ve read. On nearly every page, there is rage. The title story in The Portable Virgin (1991) ends with the memorable line: ‘I’ve nowhere else to go. I love that man.’ Her female characters are restless, tormented, unhappy in their domestic roles, searching for ...”

“... in a frontal lobe of the brain. Atran attends more seriously to the idea of memes started by Richard Dawkins; started like a hare, perhaps, but still enjoying a fashion, if no longer in Dawkins’s hands (or even with his blessing). Atran thinks there are things going for the notion, and that it may find a place in the theory of cognition. But it ...”

“... evidence, and that misinterpreted. It is certainly difficult to see how anyone who has actually read Buchan, Sapper and Yates can yoke the first with the other two. For the difference in flavour – between decency and indecency – compare these three bouts between hero and foreigner. Hannay v. Colonel von Stumm in Greenmantle: He half tripped over a ...”

“... hostility,’ and that may be so. But there has been some excellent work done on Pound recently: Richard Sieburth’s Instigations, Leon Surette’s A Light from Eleusis, and now Alexander’s manageably-sized study of the whole corpus of the poetry, and Woodward’s of The Pisan Cantos. My feeling is that Pound’s stock is rising, and that one reason for ...”