“... much ingenuity in planning as office life. Imagining what it would be like to live in a house is more intriguing than imagining how it would feel to work in a bank, and amateurs have as much right as anyone to an opinion.The question that always arises is whether the architect has to serve the client’s wishes or should plan for a better way of ...”

“... revealed that there were other ways of writing verse than those prescribed either by the Dylan Thomas school of apocalyptic word-chimers, or by the Movement, in whose manifestos he detected – rightly, I think – a fatal ‘whiff of little Englandism’. So, after beginning unsteadily, with early poems that had not quite assimilated the influences of ...”

“... taxes can be cut while military spending is piled high, and those deficits – hey, who cares any more? Totemic fame has its price. Eponymous labels can be misleading. Economists who have never actually read any of the works of Keynes and Schumpeter nonetheless confidently invoke their names in identifying stylised concepts; and it is pointless to complain ...”

“... robes, clambering up and down staircases of keys or key-thumping in caverns. ‘After all,’ Thomas Mullaney writes, ‘if a Chinese typewriter is really the size of two ping-pong tables put together, need anything more be said about the deficiencies of the Chinese language?’ To many Western eyes, the characters were ...”

“... He would sit there in his old raincoat and brown trilby, rocking slightly as he wove his ever more exuberant fantasies, on which, I have to admit, I looked less admiringly then than I do in retrospect. I had the spot in the show immediately following Peter’s monologue, which was scheduled to last five minutes or so but would often last for fifteen, when ...”

“... they were published with immense success in 1590 as illustrations (engraved by Theodor de Bry) to Thomas Harriot’s Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia – suggests that what was made as a record was used as advertising. The Report was issued in German, Latin and French editions as well as in English. That Harriot and White’s book was ...”

“... What a good subject, or at least successful subject, consists in, according to the machine, is more so. The computer looks for subjects by looking for clusters of nouns – if kitten, furball, whiskers and paws appear then some of the book is about cats – and calculating how much space the clusters take up. In a sample of 5000 novels 0.001 per cent of ...”

“... name. The ritual of identification has rules. For example, no animal or plant has been allowed more than one scientific name since Linnaeus established the system of applying first a generic and then a specific name in his Systema Naturae two and a half centuries ago. This form of shorthand was a blessing, replacing as it did Latin descriptions that were ...”

“... Founded by private subscription in 1841, the London Library was the brainchild of Thomas Carlyle, a serious man. For its 150th anniversary, the present guardians of the London Library have chosen an eminent comedian, John Wells, to write their celebratory history. The sage of Chelsea would not have been amused. But then, nothing did amuse him ...”

“... form of death – drowning, say, on the way to Malta, or an intestinal catastrophe still more catastrophic than the ones which figured in the psychosomatic melodrama of his life – there is a widespread feeling that it would have been better for all concerned, better even for Coleridge himself, had he simply ceased to exist during the first years of ...”

“... The Governesses, published in France in 1992, began as a short story.* Even now it comes to little more than a hundred pages. Three governesses, ‘mistresses of games and pleasures’, are employed to entertain the four young sons of the Austeur family. Although they have individual names (Eléonore, Laura and Inès), the governesses work as one. When they ...”

“... He had come to announce a plan ‘to revitalise history’s place in our schools’. ‘Nothing is more important to the survival of the British nation,’ he declared, ‘than an understanding among its young of our shared heritage and the nature of the struggles, foreign and domestic, which have secured our freedoms.’ We cannot be surprised that some ...”

“... When Thomas Jefferson was introduced as the new American Ambassador to France in 1784, legend has it that the French minister asked if he was Benjamin Franklin’s replacement, and Jefferson replied that he was merely Franklin’s successor; no one could replace him. Whether or not the story is true, it conveys Franklin’s stature as the only serious rival to George Washington for the title of America’s greatest hero of the age ...”

“... sources into the narratology of modern angst. But his effort to see the diary as something more than ‘full, objective reporting’, a bigger literary deal than just ‘a concomitant of Pepys’s delight in book-keeping’, points in the right direction. The work somehow retains its currency as ‘one of the great classics of literature’ (to stick ...”

“... disaster: ‘negligently played’ at the Blackfriars Theatre, according to its title page, ‘and more squeamishly beheld’. The actors were hissed off stage, but Jonson, possessed of what the Renaissance scholar Joseph Loewenstein has called a ‘bibliographic ego’, was not a man to walk away. The printed text of 1631 includes sustained criticism of the ...”