“... other; indeed, I made my own grammar of the poetic dialect as I went along.’ A century later, Richard Bentley – the founder of historical philology who took Scaliger as his model – used his own granular mastery of Greek literature to show that the letters ascribed to the tyrant Phalaris must be a later composition. His critics at Christ Church replied ...”

“... refused access.Biographies convince us by being authoritative rather than objective. The musician Richard Witts, whose biography of Nico was published in 1993, was asked by her to write her life. She wanted him to make it like a novel and he did, dramatising postwar Berlin, Paris in the 1950s, New York and London in the 1960s and 1970s, Manchester in the ...”

“... But the winning political coalition forged by FDR was shattered in the 1960s and 1970s, and under Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan American politics took a conservative turn. Democrats are still divided over how to respond.Today, an air of foreboding hangs over the party. Despite the rapid economic recovery from the pandemic, Joe Biden’s approval rating ...”

“... hero-worshipped Ronald Reagan. In his closing sentences this entrepreneur speaks of buying up some English newspapers in order to put me, and others like me, out of a job. I had a brief cackle on the telephone with the Spectator’s then-editor and filed it away under ‘department of empty threats’. I had much the same reaction after meeting a British ...”

“... half still-life, half interior, on his dust-jacket. The treasure-house created by the miniaturist Richard Cosway at 20 Stratford Place, Oxford Street is a case in point. Wainwright cites the 1821 sale catalogue of this collection, but not Hazlitt’s recollection of its ‘specimens of art, antiquarianism, and vertu, jumbled all together in the richest ...”

“... in Austin, Texas, undoubtedly at the initiative of Professor Wm Roger Louis, whose Kerr Chair of English History and Culture at the University of Texas was one of the two principal sponsors (along with the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library), although the president and staff of the hyper-rich Pennzoil Company and sundry U of T outfits are also thanked for their ...”

“... outwitting Leavis about the meaning of Empson’s ‘Legal Fiction’, and declaring his ‘un-English’ refusal to accept Shakespeare’s ‘essential “greatness”’. And according to Hawkes, Wittgenstein’s remark implies not only that Shakespeare’s reputation results from conventional praise rather than any inherent value, but that ‘no text ...”

“... let alone courtliness. Life is now a teeming Holiday Inn. It’s striking that American English comes to play another of its tricks here, and makes ‘checking-out’ slang for ‘dying’. As for Eberhard, most readers will give up after an early salvo of ‘operational definitions’, ‘intromittent organs’ and ‘genitalic contacts’. Which ...”

“... address the question of sexism in language, and to do so in terms of satire. He imagines that the English language evolved in such a way that pronouns and grammatical forms must respect the colour of the people referred to rather than their gender – not ‘he’ and ‘she’, but ‘whe’ and ‘ble’. He (or rather ‘whe’) then produces a resourceful ...”

“... and music patron Baron Gottfried van Swieten, the guardian angel of Mozart’s late style. Richard Taruskin accuses Stravinsky of lying about the original idea of The Rite of Spring, which was visual and frankly ‘Scriabinistic’ rather than purely musical. In various autobiographical statements Stravinsky dismissed the help of Nicholas Roerich in ...”

“... de Antonio, Henry Geldzahler, Andy Warhol, Robert Frank, Walker Evans, Tom Hess, Lisette Model, Richard Avedon, Marvin Israel, and the pop art collectors Robert and Ethel Scull.’ Bosworth’s concentration on the sex-and-society aspect of her subject’s life means that she rarely illuminates the work for us. There is, of course, a temptingly easy ...”

“... and John Morris (both of whom wrote elegant memoirs of Orwell at the BBC); he employed Nye Bevan, Richard Acland, J.B.S. Haldane, T.S. Eliot, Quintin Hogg, Bernard Shaw; he led a BBC party, that included Guy Burgess, to a special de-briefing by Stafford Cripps on his abortive mission to India. Working for the BBC gave Orwell the experience, however ...”

“... miles away, immersed in philology and comparative jurisprudence. His friends or admirers, from Richard Price to Mary Wollstonecraft, might be making trouble, but at least he wouldn’t be replying to Burke’s Reflections. There wasn’t much danger of Jones fomenting unrest in India. Franklin makes persuasive analogies between the subaltern peoples whose ...”

“... worked for Darwin among others, Hawkins worked on the Crystal Palace dinosaurs with the scientist Richard Owen, who had coined the word ‘dinosaur’ (from the Greek deinos, ‘terrible’, and sauros, ‘lizard’) in 1841. Theirs was the first attempt to revivify dry fossil bones and even drier scientific discourse for a large public. Though the sculptures ...”

“... property, and tapping the expatriate communities in Europe and the United States, along with English-speaking Africa. One ‘frequent flyer’ businessman I met in Onitsha boasted that he had made a handsome profit by flogging pirated copies of Living in Bondage (1995) to his connections in Italy, where he regularly travelled to buy water ...”