“... proverb is right, the translation I have just offered of the proverb itself must be just one more betrayal. Indeed, the case against me is strong. The Italian phrase gets much of its force from the jingling assonance of the two words, but one finds swiftly that it is no good trying to reproduce this with the weaker assonances available in ...”

“... fiction, and certainly for anyone interested in 18th-century literature, there could scarcely be a more significant book. Yet the novel that burst on the world in 1740 is almost entirely unknown. This new Oxford edition of Pamela is the first British one ever to return to Richardson’s original. In America, Richardson’s biographers Duncan Eaves and Ben ...”

“... That marvellous line from Thomas Hardy’s ‘At the Railway Station’: ‘And the man in the handcuffs suddenly sang/With grimful glee …’ Frank Auerbach to William Feaver And the man in the handcuffs suddenly sang With grimful glee: ‘This life so free Is the thing for me!’ And the constable smiled, and said no word ...”

“... wronged.Mary Ellen was a novelist’s daughter as well as a novelist’s wife; her father was Thomas Love Peacock. As a youthful walker and talker and poet and witty novelist, Peacock seemed unlikely to find gainful employment (Shelley helped him out when he was imprisoned for debt). He liked women and lived with his clever mother; he fell in love, was ...”

“... five hundred street injectors, but cocaine use has rocketed in the last few years. In the Thistle, more than 60 per cent of injections are of cocaine. Some people mix the two to create ‘snowballs’; Ryan alternates between them. In 2023, there was a 30 per cent increase in the number of people requiring hospital treatment for cocaine use in Glasgow, though ...”

“... revenge for the Franco-Prussian War. The Boulez-Chéreau Ring has also been described, more preposterously, as ‘the Ring of the century’ – an accolade which plainly belongs to the 1951 Wieland Wagner production which inaugurated the ‘New Bayreuth’. Musically, the Boulez Ring cannot compare with Furtwängler’s La Scala performance or ...”

“... piffle’. Who’s to tell how few of them, or how many hundreds of thousands more, have ever heard the piece from start to finish? The question would not interest the city editors, but as a rhetorical device has long been popular with the cultural authorities. If in the homelands of the Austro-German symphony a ...”

“... art-world figure I knew in New York … was Henry Geldzahler.’ When the director of the Met, Thomas Hoving, wanted to put on an Andrew Wyeth show, Geldzahler was against it – Wyeth’s figurative paintings were the very opposite of the art he believed in and succoured. But when it became clear the show would go ahead, Geldzahler ‘wrote privately to ...”

“... this retail unit could be yours in just seven days’ time. As you got closer to town there were more jacket potato and sandwich shops (at Fatso’s Filling Station a sandwich, crisps and drink was £2.49), pawnbrokers and gambling shops. At the end there’s a covered shopping centre with Boots, a Vodafone shop, Starbucks: you finally come into a ...”

“... of a printed text in Greek, but it is unmistakably clear that the decision to include it was made more or less at the last, certainly with the full support of his publisher, Johann Froben, who may well have sponsored the idea. Four hundred and fifty years later, the Greek text and Latin translation have been relegated alike to the archives of humanist ...”

“... Manteo and Wanchese, two men from what is now North Carolina, worked with Raleigh’s navigator Thomas Hariot to devise an Algonquian alphabet to learn about America’s ‘singuler great comodities’. Between 1550 and 1800 the Americas were the source of 80 per cent of the world’s silver and 70 per cent of its gold, although as Raleigh and his ...”

“... Sometimes​ there’s nothing more useful than bad news. So when it was confirmed at the start of September that Canada’s economy was in recession, the leaders of the opposition parties were turning cartwheels on their way to the stump. ‘The news that is consuming Ottawa today is old hat to Canadians across the country,’ declared Justin Trudeau, the Liberal Party’s youthful leader and the son of Canada’s long-serving prime minister Pierre Trudeau ...”

“... In​ the summer of 1963, between the appearance of Thomas Pynchon’s first book and the Beatles’ second long-player, John Williams, a professor at the University of Denver, sent his agent in New York a draft of his latest novel, which detailed the unhappy marriage, undistinguished career and early death from cancer of an imagined professor at the University of Missouri a generation earlier ...”

“... Almost no one noticed. If his name was ever mentioned it was usually in connection with those of more famous collaborators. He was the producer of Michelangelo Antonioni’s legendary flop Zabriskie Point, which came out in 1970, and the year before he made a cameo appearance in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, where ‘Harrison Starr, the ...”

“... poems, from Terry Street (published in 1969, and reissued with this selection) through four more volumes to the widely acclaimed Elegies (1985). Terry Street and the two following volumes, The Happier Life and Love or Nothing, were well received as plain unvarnished poems of Northern suburbia: and now the inventory of working-class clothes, foods and ...”