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“... enough to be used as building blocks rather than just as reading matter isn’t far wide of the mark. (For the record, the RSC weighs in at 5lb 12oz, substantially lighter than the 1986 Oxford’s commercially suicidal 8lb 8oz, but noticeably heavier than the 2005 revised Oxford’s 4lb 8oz.) Back in the 1620s it was so expensive to produce the First Folio ...”

“... days of Andrew Jackson, the great champion of the white settlers on the frontier. Young Harry read Mark Twain, played the piano and listened to Mozart. He disapproved of boxing, guns and Wagner. Endowed with porch-front charm, he was self-conscious about his ‘girl’s mouth’ and his ‘inordinate desire to look nice’ when posing for photographs. His ...”

“... his own bullet-points into company with their resounding dénouement, a bullet that clipped its mark. The iconography of his fist-pump and bloodied face immediately became the image he had waited for all his life, as – on the floor, with mad bravery and media savvy beyond the bounds of reason – he prepared for the photo-op. ‘Let me get my ...”

“... or end, shape, or intelligent and intelligible control.’ Incontinence was not supposed to be a mark of talent; and Thomas couldn’t help being intimidated by poetry’s costive presiding judges. He was too fluent, and came to no conclusions; according to Spender, he hadn’t learned how to write real poems. There had to be something disingenuous about ...”

“... of the war, Joyce had ‘broadcast for the enemy’, and that was enough to finish him. A.J.P. Taylor later remarked that he was hanged for making a false statement on a passport – the usual penalty for which was a small fine. Widespread wireless ownership led to a wartime golden age of radio propaganda. The Nazis were quickest off the ...”

“... wrestled with the desire to be praised openly for his denial of worldly values’.Cut from here to Mark Twain’s ‘The Story of a Good Little Boy’ (who does this remind you of?):Jacob had a noble ambition to be put in a Sunday school book. He wanted to be put in with pictures representing him gloriously declining to lie to his mother … and pictures ...”

“... mainland triggered protests and uprisings across the imperial periphery as the historian Miles Taylor has shown. The transportation en masse of potential trouble-makers from England and Ireland triggered protests in Australia and the Cape Colony. To keep sugar cheap the British government abandoned the system of tariff walls known as ‘imperial ...”

“... On 15 June 1794, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, prodigious, garrulous and chubby, his brilliant undergraduate career in tatters, set out from Cambridge in the company of a steady companion called Hucks, picturesquely intent on a walking tour of North Wales. Their route took them through Oxford, where they looked up one of Coleridge’s old schoolmates, who took the visitors to see a notorious democrat at Balliol called Robert Southey ...”

“... one thing about Anna Letitia Barbauld, which was her appearance in a droll anecdote told by Samuel Taylor Coleridge towards the end of his life and recorded in the posthumous volume of his Table Talk. ‘Mrs Barbauld told me that the only faults she found with the Ancient Mariner were – that it was improbable, and had no moral,’ Coleridge is reported as ...”

“... one presumably needs to make sense of everything else).The most significant book published to mark Charlotte’s 200th birthday was Claire Harman’s Life, the first serious new biography since Lyndall Gordon’s Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life in 1994 and Juliet Barker’s The Brontës from the same year (biographies seem to come in generational ...”

“... country ballads, John Wesley Harding. In a sense the conspiracy theory wasn’t far off the mark. The crash wasn’t a fiction, but it was – or it served as – a moment of sudden and drastic re-evaluation. As Shelton drily remarks, ‘it was widely reported that Dylan nearly lost his life. It seems more likely that the mishap saved his life.’ ‘In ...”

“... material’, as scripts were called at the studio, were passed to his friend, the director Mark Rydell, who was so smooth Gucci wore his shoes. (‘I love what you do’ were his first words.) There were more trips, more late-night calls from the producer, more huddles, more oleaginous words, more rewrites. On the basis of the Pollack draft the film ...”

“... Americanisms and entirely in earnest.Presenting the document at the Pentagon, its author, Laura Taylor-Kale, underscored the need for the state to boost its defence industry as America’s adversaries build up their military power to levels not seen since the Second World War. She noted the intensifying threat of China upending the existing international ...”

“... At my high school, Daphne du Maurier was on the English department reading list, along with Taylor Caldwell and all those other books by Twain. I read Sydney Sheldon’s first five novels, Judith Krantz’s first three; until I went to college, I believed that Watership Down was the best book I’d ever read – and I was right. What attracted me ...”

“... could find no place for it, and in the book as it stands, they have had to employ italics to mark the status of several flashbacks. Some of these sections – the relentless teasing of Rufus by a pack of older boys; a visit by the family to back-country relatives – go on too long and hardly fit the narrative. Reading this work of memory and ...”