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“... the excitement: ‘A wild, bustling time we had of it. I played my part as a conspirator in a small way, and made friends with two or three gallant men.’ Mission accomplished, they returned to Bordeaux, embarked for Dublin on the packet Leeds, and enjoyed fine nights on deck with ‘certain agreeable samples of womankind’, singing songs and reading ...”

“... find it.” That is the most important truth that has ever been uttered,’ he said in his Leslie Stephen Lecture of 1933, published as The Name and Nature of Poetry. His poetry is always fascinated by what is irresolvable – ‘Keep we must, if keep we can/These foreign laws of God and man’ – and his scholarly prose concerned, above all, with such ...”

“... congruent, whether you draw them from Clark Clifford’s memoirs, Seymour Hersh’s critique, Stephen Ambrose’s judicious biography of Nixon or the recollections of Averell Harriman, Richard Holbrooke or Daniel Davidson. Mr Isaacson has added some extra but exiguous detail to the story. By shopping on both sides of the street, and betraying the side he ...”

“... Interpretation of Literature’. This belittling tag, coined in a 1988 essay of the same name by Stephen Parrish, general editor of the monumental Cornell Wordsworth, reflected two more widespread beliefs in literary theory: that ‘language is prior to thought’ and that authorial intention is ‘not only elusive and illusory, but irrelevant’. In the ...”

“... Juliet Barker finds the idea ‘ludicrous’, but says no more. Wordsworth éminence grise Stephen Gill thought that a verdict on Johnston’s claims would only be possible after ‘years’ of ‘rigorous scholarly assessment’. It was about a year and a half before the speculation was scotched. Michael Durey, writing in the TLS, proved that ‘Mr ...”

“... oval, straight, its parts moderately defined, forehead smooth, nose narrow, slightly hooked, mouth small’. Like many of his scientific contemporaries (there were a dozen competing taxonomies in Blumenbach’s day, classifying humans into between two and seven types), he was also setting up a hierarchy. ‘The white colour holds the first place,’ he ...”

“... English parcels varied, so merchants sprang up in the barrack-rooms to trade in commodities for a small cigarette percentage. Anyone wanting to exchange a meat loaf for a tin of Spam went to a merchant, and you went to them if you wanted to buy a Yorkshire pudding, for instance. Each merchant had a list of current prices attached to the barrack-room door ...”

“... such a transparent near-hoax, but that, they should have bothered with international law at all. Stephen Greenblatt, in Marvellous Possessions, makes a similar suggestion about Columbus’s remark that he was not contradicted – ‘y no me fué contradicho’ – when he took possession of a series of Caribbean islands in the name of the Spanish king. How ...”

“... and a brilliantly inventive and headlong sequence, propelled by Michel Legrand’s sparkling small-combo jazz score, that takes the action to Paris, where, coincidentally, fashion magnates and tastemakers from around the world have convened for the generic prêt-à-porter collections. Sergei meets a fashion magnate at the airport and shares a cab with ...”

“... few hundred. Even Shaw and Henry James were reduced to four admittedly vast volumes apiece, a very small proportion of what is extant. Leonard Woolf, of whose letters eight thousand were available, has had to be shrunk to this one sizeable volume of about six hundred. His editor naturally regrets this limitation. One can believe him when he says that all ...”

“... Dawkins on one side and Eldredge on the other. Eldredge is associated in this controversy with Stephen Jay Gould, his long-term research collaborator.* The disagreement, and the heat that it generates, are difficult for an outsider to understand, but they appear to have something to do with the way in which evolutionary theory is to be presented to a ...”

“... marvellously encapsulates the Jacobson journey through time – which begins tenderly with a small boy being handed through a train window from mother to father, and ends with the author in hospital, seeing not himself in the mirror but his father. Time, and time again, has passed. And yet more time. At one point he gently shows himself as a ...”

“... at the centre of a now visible two-class society – Britain in the 1980s. As we sit idly by, a small élite of quite extraordinary wealth rediscovers opera. ‘The middling sort’ of citizenry may, of course, find their way into the upper circle. But the language of opera, rendered histrionically, invades other places, and the culture of opera can quite ...”

“... this shows that decriminalisation will not transform the social scene more than would admitting a small percentage of immigrants, though in each case a subculture will emerge, or emerge more strongly than before. One possible objection to the libertarian argument for repeal therefore falls away. Nor are unenforced laws a matter of indifference, since they can ...”

“... aware of the problems but optimistic that they could be overcome,’ he said in an interview with Stephen Colbert. ‘The book is the story, perhaps, of how I was wrong about that … I couldn’t believe it was that bad … I thought it was possible to work with somebody. I thought surely they would want to learn about the complexity of arms control ...”