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“... with other analogous predicaments. D’Aguiar himself takes as the epigraph to his introduction Stephen Dedalus’s description of Irish art from Ulysses, ‘The cracked lookingglass of a servant’ – a turn of phrase which Stephen immediately realises may be both apt and marketable. Dabydeen and all other poets who ...”

“... Brenda Maddox’s use of them in her book on Nora, and the iron curtain which in retaliation Stephen Joyce has dropped around his grandfather’s flame. In Professor A.N. Other’s hands, this would have been a duller and more comprehensively researched book. Probably F.R. Leavis is long enough dead (although the keepers of his gem-like flame remain ...”

“... which nevertheless has many good things in it. Nine essays, mostly dealing with single pictures or small related groups, necessarily offer a patchy view of the period from 1700 to 1850. The unity of the book depends on the coherence or otherwise of its critical position. This John Barrell describes in his Foreword as a new approach, developed over the past ten ...”

“... Butters’s The Triumph of Vulcan (1996), which includes a photograph of the English sculptor Stephen Cox (born 1946), stripped to the waist, caressing the smooth flanks of the quarry on Mons Porphyrites. Cox was the first person since antiquity to obtain porphyry from this source, and a huge chunk of it, partly worked by him and partly by Roman quarry ...”

“... literary and mythological allegories. In The Crisis of 1614, essays by Jonathan Gibson and Stephen Clucas show Ralegh’s cousin Sir Arthur Gorges adapting Lucan’s verse history of Rome’s civil wars, and Jonson’s friend Sir Robert Cotton rewriting the reign of Henry III, with an eye to Jacobean political anxieties. Cotton was among the most ...”

“... between Tony Blair and George W. Bush delayed things by a year. In 2014 it was agreed that a ‘small number of full extracts from the minutes of [Cabinet] meetings’ thought to be ‘most critical’ could be published. The sensitivity of the Blair/Bush correspondence – it was claimed that disclosure could make future leaders chary of frank discussion ...”

“... 1980, the European Parliament returned to the attack. By a shrewd procedural device, it voted only small changes in the 1981 budget – but a huge supplementary budget for 1980, enabling the Community to spend on regional and employment aid in 1981 most of what the Governments had previously refused. Taken aback, the Governments couldn’t muster a big enough ...”

“... well before the deadline, and often in person. A new editorial assistant, handed copy by the small seventy-five-year-old in a deerstalker who had scaled the steep stairs to our earlier offices, decided he must be a Mercury messenger. In these Diaries Taylor wrote about the early days of CND, his contempt for the New English Bible, his delight in nude ...”

“... we learn that his beloved ‘blues’ are not glorious, fugitive slices of heaven, but a small-winged, drab, obscurely differentiated tribe which includes a great number of widely-distributed species. So why choose them? Presumably because he was serious, in love with difficult identifications – and because this rapidly differentiating family held ...”

“... that the Red Sox lost game seven as well. Bill Buckner moved to Idaho. Oh, the curse! Yet, as Stephen Jay Gould points out in an essay in this posthumous collection of his baseball writings, it was not Buckner’s fault that the Red Sox lost the Series. When Buckner made his mistake, Boston had already blown their lead (on a wild pitch, though almost no ...”

“... survive because, despite its merits, it ‘mimes transgression but never crosses the boundary’. Stephen Haggard’s Nya is the story of the love between a young man and a 13-year-old girl. Readers of Lolita will imagine such a book as a hotbed of sexual and linguistic transgression. But in Nya nothing untoward happens. Sexual innocence is not even tempted ...”

“... out in more than one long exhausting walk and vigorous playful tussles, was unwearying.’ Leslie Stephen, one of Meredith’s friends, eulogised the effects of an invigorating tramp in the country in the true spirit: ‘You can consume your modest sandwiches, light your pipe, and feel more virtuous, and thoroughly at peace with the universe, than it is easy ...”

“... It is still often proposed that religion and science need not conflict. Stephen Jay Gould held that they occupy ‘non-overlapping magisteria’: science deals with questions of fact, religion with questions of value and meaning. This is wishful thinking, because religions base themselves on factual claims. The god Yahweh promised the land of Canaan to Abraham and his descendants; Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon from golden plates received from the angel Moroni; Jesus of Nazareth is seated at the right hand of the Father, and will return to judge the living and the dead ...”

“... was not yet all writer, and in this year we find him speculating in South African gold and sailing small boats, ‘with the wind’s melancholy song in the rigging rising above the accompaniment of the immense and monotonous voice of huge billows ceaselessly breaking in an infinity of grey skies, green water and dazzling foam’. He was 38 and clearly needed ...”

“... have attracted accomplished disciples. One of the best books on Barthes is by the Englishman Stephen Heath, written in French, and Barthesian French at that. No small feat. But all such endeavours have an unavoidable air of trotting obediently along paths that have been opened up by others. A further difficulty is that ...”