“... It was a rather dotty piece of satirical Science Fiction (so Green says – I confess I haven’t read it), in which some invaders from the Fourth Dimension (identifiable with Chamberlain, Beatrice Webb and Milner) conspire with the Duc de Mersch (King Leopold of the Belgians) to ‘civilise’ Greenland’s Eskimos. The protagonist of the novel, Arthur ...”

“... fat sheep, three barrels of beer, and six dozen of bread’. The hero of death is the hefty Richard Dawson of Malpas in Cheshire, who died of the plague in 1625. He knew that he was too heavy for his nephew and a servant-girl to bury, so he dug his own grave and climbed in to die. Birth, Marriage and Death is packed with such tales. It has 20 ...”

“... results, I told him proudly, in the partition calculus he’d invented with his fellow Hungarian Richard Rado; I was also trying to settle a conjecture in infinite combinatorics – that there was no infinite descending sequence of countable order types. He ignored the first, questioned me about the second, thought for a few mom ents, then shrugged – which ...”

“... How many people in fact found Britain’s mainland colonies a land of opportunity? The late Richard Hofstadter suggested that the answer would almost certainly not sustain the success myth. In America at 1750: A Social Portrait, a wonderfully sensitive piece of writing, he observed that the servants as well as the slaves had been commodities, goods sold ...”

“... critical assassins: Carl Weber (‘a boorish vulgarian’), Robert Gittings (‘unscrupulous’), Richard Purdy (‘incapable of psychological insight into sexual matters’) and Michael Millgate (‘prim’), the devoted Hardy scholars who have given us studies of the work, an edition of the letters and several biographies. In an argument never explicitly ...”

“... out for undercover police. If they ever leave the neighbourhood, or go to the movies, or even read a book, we don’t hear about it. What they mostly do is hang out in the crack house and in their apartments, drinking, using what seem to be enormous amounts of drugs, and, with the prodding of Bourgois, talking – and talking – about themselves and ...”

“... thought they might well be viewed as links between mammals, birds and reptiles. His bête noire, Richard Owen, held fast to Platonisin, however, and denied that they were intermediate to anything – he placed the platypus with the edentates (armadillos, again). Owen even denied that Ornithorychus laid eggs, though British settlers and Aborigines said they ...”

“... war promised to bring campaigns to an end more quickly and decisively. His articles and books were read with interest but little engagement by most of his compatriots. The British Army between the wars was small potatoes compared to the Navy, and a lot less exciting than the RAF; in any case, all the Armed Services were on short commons until the late ...”

“... of Enlightenment, anglicisation and politeness throughout the English-speaking world, not only read, but spawning imitations, from the Edinburgh of the Easy Club to Massachusetts, where a group of Harvard students began a weekly periodical, the Telltale, in 1721. The erudite Porter also knows a more nuanced version of his story, having as he does an ...”

“... but he also knew that the real story was in Pakistan. He decided to investigate the links between Richard Reid, the shoe-bomber who mercifully lost his nerve, and Islamist groups in Pakistan. This was what Musharraf thought ‘too intrusive’. Pakistani officials more than once told Mariane that if he had behaved like other foreign journalists, the tragedy ...”

“... work on a screen version of his novel La Vie des Abeilles. When the script was translated Goldwyn read it with increasing consternation until he could no longer deny the evidence of his senses. ‘My God!’ he cried. ‘The hero is a bee!’ As Ian Hamilton tells it in Writers in Hollywood, Maeterlinck was sent packing, despite his attempt to improve his ...”

“... for a past homeland experienced at a distance and in conditions of relative ease. More often we read of poverty, distrust, conflict, self-doubt and legal insecurity, not only before and during World War Two but after it, in the new forms of persecution called up by the Cold War. This book is ungainly. It does not promise or perform completion ...”

“... was particularly unimpressed by an unnaturally informative cloth label pasted to the back, which read: ‘Shakspere/Born April 23 = 1564/Died April 23 – 1616/Aged 52/This Likeness taken 1603/Age at that time 39 ys.’ Spielmann doesn’t say so, but it’s hard not to suspect that this label was written to overcompensate for that missing two-inch ...”

“... dear and one of the funniest grotesques in America’, accepted the ‘stipend’ on behalf of ‘Richard Python’. ‘The great fiction story is now being rehearsed before our very eyes, in the Nixon administration,’ Corey announced. He described Gravity’s Rainbow as ‘a small contribution to a certain degree, since there are over three and a half ...”

“... of blarney in this passionately articulate novel, which takes certain surreal premises as read in order to conduct its mythic discussion of Irish histories. To grant these premises for the duration of a reading is in this case, as it is not in much ‘playful’ fiction, to be carried with great momentum into an unfamiliar but internally consistent ...”