“... it made apologies, we were left with no real sense of what exactly had been done. The situation said a lot about the power of the police and the power of the media to move the police to apology. Yet the story went deeper than that. What was it to live a second life? What was it to use a person’s identity – and did anyone own it in the first place? Is it ...”

“... than with evolution, and whose vision of ‘a natural science of society’ was, it has often been said, more taxonomic than analytical.* But the appearance is, I think, superficial, for two reasons. In the first place, as insisted by W.E.H. Stanner in his entry on Radcliffe-Brown in the 1966 Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Radcliffe-Brown’s ...”

“... centred on the Fenian bombing campaign of the 1880s. ‘I won’t even try to explain,’ Conrad said in a note written in 1920,why I should have been arrested by a little passage of about seven lines, in which the author … reproduced a short dialogue held in the lobby of the House of Commons after some unexpected anarchist outrage with the home secretary ...”

“... the end of his life in 1977 at the age of 60. He goes up and he comes down. He was a man, as he said himself, of ‘tumbles and leaps’, a man of extremes, of moods and moments, and of the moment, of nerves, fresh starts and escapes, whose illness and convulsive life gained access to, if they were not inseparable from, an art nerved to resist them. He was ...”

“... it would have demonstrated a photographic memory for his own past journalistic work. As Edward Sullivan, who 60 years ago first identified several dozen lengthy recyclings, put it: ‘If Maupassant did compose his book on the Bel-Ami in 1887, the yacht’s gear must have included a file of clippings of his old articles in the Gaulois and the ...”

“... Rosa Klebb-like figure in a decaying Carlton House Terrace apartment. She asked me my politics; I said ‘Labour.’ ‘Not a Communist?’ ‘No.’ ‘Oh well, that’s all right then.’ So I passed that interview, and was scheduled for a second sometime later; but I withdrew when my postgraduate research grant came through. The extraordinary ...”

“... and given custodial sentences; Lambert mysteriously walked away. Special Branch officers have said that Lambert must have acted alone; that even if the allegations are true, it is inconceivable that he had permission to do what he did. Under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act of 2000, covert policing requires advance authorisation from senior ...”

“... to portraiture. A lovely painting by Joshua Reynolds, probably from the late 1760s, is often said to be a portrait of Barber. It shows a fine-featured, rather dreamy-looking young man in three-quarters profile, with a high forehead and finely curled black hair somewhat receding at the temples. If this is a portrait of him, it is in at least one respect ...”

“... there are a few from 1734-35, nothing from 1736. By 1738, Johnson is writing fairly frequently to Edward Cave, on business connected with the Gentleman’s Magazine. In the 1740s he is launched – from our point of view – as a letter-writer, with a circle of friends and acquaintances sufficient to elicit sequences of correspondence. The Johnson of ...”

“... been confirmed by the formation of the Royal Shakespeare Company – a title of which it has been said that ‘it’s got everything in it except God.’ And indeed the many resemblances between Shakespeare and God have become commonplaces since the Romantic era. In practice, of course, the idea of his transcendence tends to reinforce conservative political ...”

“... of a mind coming to terms with itself. For Vendler, it appears, structure reminds us that what is said has been overseen, that thought has enjoyed reflection. Certainly, many of her chosen texts present reflective selves coherently coping with loss. It cannot simply be the tendency of American poets to drop dead in taxis, jump off bridges and gas themselves ...”

“... for his friend Arnaud, to whom he recommends the shirtmaker – the circle does close. Asked by Edward Hirsch, who interviewed him for the Paris Review, how he ‘hit upon’ his ‘distinctive, beautiful and implacable’ prose style, Salter answered tersely, almost evasively: ‘I like to write. I’m moved by writing. One can’t analyse it beyond ...”

“... Margaret Tudor to James IV. ‘London thow art of Towynys A per se’, an anonymous poem, is said in one surviving manuscript copy to have been delivered at a dinner held by the Lord Mayor during the Christmas festivities that accompanied this visit, by ‘a Scottysh preyst sytting at oon of the syde tablys’. The poem is lavish in its praise of ...”

“... argued in his Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840), that modern systemic science could be said to begin with Linnaeus. Whewell wrote at a time when a wide variety of new lexical systems had been accepted as the matrices of scientific discourse. Each system, whether in botany, geology or comparative anatomy, gave identity and focus to a field of ...”

“... spirit’. Perhaps too medieval: Webb’s macabre wedding gift was a bedroom wardrobe decorated by Edward Burne-Jones with the blood libel story from Chaucer’s ‘Prioress’s Tale’. The Virgin Mary – modelled by Jane – tends to St Nicholas, who had his throat cut by the Jews before miraculously returning to life.Furnishing the Red House inspired ...”