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“... of boys as the wary or daring young animal grows up. His present biographer mentions that Reid’s small feet had high insteps, which – to me, at any rate – suggests someone capable of springing into some other air. I had not noticed his feet, nor did I know that this lonely and engaging man was a pederast – one who found the homosexual and heterosexual ...”

“... has sounded a discordant and unusual note among writers on Victorian England. She defended a (small c) ‘conservative’ perspective long before conservatism became intellectually fashionable. She was deciphering ‘ideas in context’ more than a decade before such an approach became the new orthodoxy of academic journals: indeed, her stock-in-trade has ...”

“... smartness. Inspecting the Queen Mary, in 1936, she was not only miffed at the inappropriately small room in which her large panel had been placed, but, to quote Frances Spalding, ‘marvelled at its effective line in slick vulgarity and took particular dislike to the extensive reliefs, painted a sham gold and silver with metallic varnish’. It is ironic ...”

“... so-called ‘Noah’s Ark’ school, whose adherents contend that all modern humans descend from a small population of fully modern humans living in Africa around 200,000 years ago. These people spread throughout the world, reaching the Levant 90,000 years ago, Australia around 60,000 years ago, and Europe 40,000 years ago. Indigenous populations were quickly ...”

“... In Shirley Jackson’s best-known story, ‘The Lottery’, the residents of a small New England village get together on a summer morning to draw lots. The sun shines, the children play, the villagers chat: it takes a few pages to figure out that they’re deciding who should be stoned to death this year. The New Yorker published the story in 1948, and got more calls and letters and cancelled subscriptions than ever before or since ...”

“... explanation will suffice. ‘Cumulative selection’, the building-up of large effects in many small stages, is the key to the problem of good design. Small, advantageous genetic changes, each in isolation highly probable, are preserved as they arise, and gradually accumulate to the point where they constitute vastly ...”

“... Henry II sought to limit ecclesiastical privileges, which had expanded under his predecessor, Stephen of Blois (1135-54), and to re-establish royal authority in the kingdom. To do so, it was necessary ‘to recollect and carefully write down’ the ‘ancient customs’ that had governed the law during the reign of Henry I (1100-35). Only in January ...”

“... would provide props and costumes, dress up or undress, and pose for the pictures that betray her small-town puritan husband’s penchant for spying on the female form. Often they would quarrel, as Hopper, very much the late Victorian male, repaid her support and collaboration by disparaging and discouraging her own artistic output. Childless when they died ...”

“... and early 19th centuries is now both ubiquitous and invisible, so in a sense it always was. As Stephen Deuchar shows in his impressive account of 18th-century sporting art, we know very little about almost all the artists who produced it. The names of some are known to us only through their pictures; of others, we know their names but nothing by them; of ...”

“... and Post-Impressionist pictures, Wilson relied on advance payments to the Parisian dealers Stephen Higgons and his wife, who obtained paintings from other dealers and runners who wanted immediate payment. The full extent of the Higgons account was concealed from the firm’s financial director. Then, during the mid-Seventies, there was a row with the ...”

“... familiar texts in a new light. One of the anthology’s most dense introductory essays, on the ‘small compass and tight formal constraints’ of the sonnet, could apply equally well to its own powers of compression. Rule-bound and page-limited – Simon Rae’s introduction to News that Stays News: The 20th Century in Poems compares editing an anthology to ...”

“... Stephen Leacock, the English-born, Canadian-reared humorist, has a single entry in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations: ‘Lord Ronald ... flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions’ (1911). Innumerable speakers, writers and politicians have helped themselves to this very serviceable joke; Leacock himself, writing in old age, used it without acknowledgment to illustrate a scientific disquisition ...”

“... diverting if short-winded ideas pass by in a jogging continuum, and Siesta (1926) – a gentler, small-orchestral variant of this plan – are more original conceptions, and in some ways represent the most telling part of his legacy. But there is one totally spontaneous and unique creation, the work for which I think he will be chiefly ...”

“... the crowd that was either coming from or walking towards the goddess. Bank clerks, schoolteachers, small businessmen, with their wives and children, the boys in shorts and the girls in frocks, looking like the pictures of children on the covers of exercise books, formed that tireless crowd. On the other side of the lane, after one had crossed the main ...”

“... as a pupil teacher, but so would many people if put in charge of a class when they were small, sensitive, female, and 14 years old. Officially failed teacher or not, she was the informal teacher of a ‘collier’s brat’ who became one of our century’s major writers. Meyers sets about Lydia as if the feminism of the past twenty years had never ...”