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“... other classicists, both friends of theirs: Edmund ‘Bunny’ Corcoran responds with blackmail; Richard Papen, the narrator, agrees to help dispose of Bunny. It’s an improbable set-up, but Tartt manages it deftly enough for that not to matter. Crucially, Richard is a likeable character. He’s an outsider: he comes from ...”

“... high to hear. It probably wouldn’t have made any difference. Unless you were listening to Cliff Richard or attending Billy Graham’s hallelujah meetings, the Sixties (not the decade, but that period from 1965 to 1972ish) were irresistible. They have been the good fortune and the curse of my generation (‘May you live through interesting times’): we ...”

“... that she is more concerned with the aesthetic experience we’encounter ‘temporally’ as we read the sonnet. We encounter that experience in a particularly structured way, because, as she marvellously shows, each sonnet has what she terms a ‘couplet tie’ – the words that appear in the body of the sonnet (lines 1-12) which are repeated in the ...”

“... most amazing war picture ever taken’. The caption to the full-page portrait of the photographer read ‘The Greatest War-Photographer in the World: Robert Capa’. Life also ran the story and described how Capa had crossed the river Segre with the troops the night before the action. During the next few years Capa filed pictures of war and its aftermath from ...”

“... No one who has read Crabbe’s poetry has ever denied the power of his portraits or his stories. ‘Peter Grimes’, one of the embedded sections of his great work The Borough (1810), is justly famous, and, were it better known, the story ‘Delay has danger’, part of the very uneven Tales of the Hall (1819), would be known for what it is, a masterpiece ...”

“... replica was christened ‘Shakespeare’s Globe’. The possessive might have surprised Richard and Cuthbert Burbage, who between them owned half the Globe, whereas Shakespeare’s portion amounted to a tenth; but that stake was enough to make him a member of the ‘housekeepers’ whose investments set them apart from the mere ‘sharers’ in the ...”

“... energy left in it, the Princess of Wales timed her exit impeccably. It is tempting to think that Richard Branson also understood, if only unconsciously, that public adulation is likely to tire and turn into its own opposite. Blonde, blue-eyed, apparently artless – like the Princess – he took what seemed to be life-threatening risks by boat and ...”

“... in this compelling book than in the minatory, desolate and utterly simple ‘Song’ which may be read as a return to the Vietnamese or Cambodian theme of some of Fenton’s finest earlier work: Far from the wisdom of the heart I saw a child being torn apart.    Is this you?    Is this me? The fields are mined and the night is long; Stick with me when ...”

“... Beano, the Dandy, Scotland’s Sunday Post) and the Protestant Truth Society. The printer Richard Pynson worked from here; the black-letter colophon to his A ful deuout and gostely treatyse of the imytacion and folowynge the blessed lyfe of oure moste mercyfull sauyoure cryste (1517) declares: ‘This boke Inprinted at London in Fletestrete at the ...”

“... in six editions during his life, and in two more by 1640. The most popular of the plays were Richard III and Richard II, each of which went through five editions before 1616. Romeo and Juliet went through four; Hamlet appeared in three. For readers since the 18th century, the narrative poems have been at best marginal ...”

“... up such an example of government by foreign conquerors as the world has never before seen’. Richard Strachey had not only played his part in running the Raj. It was he who, at the International Conference held in Washington in 1884, was largely responsible for the decision – which so infuriated the French – that the prime meridian should run through ...”

“... into contact with Friedrich Engels. Born into a revivalist family near the lower Rhine, Engels had read the Young Hegelians and moved sharply to the left. His views were confirmed by his experience working for his father’s business partners in Manchester, where the crass contrasts of wealth and poverty in the new industrial city led him to write The ...”

“... of knowing for sure what’s an adaptation and what’s a by-product, or ‘spandrel’ (to use Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould’s architectural analogy). In their introduction to The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative (Northwestern, $29.95), a collection of essays which will be published later in the autumn, Jonathan Gottschall ...”

“... The isolation of the farm only sharpened Updike’s work ethic: there was nothing else to do but read (Wodehouse, Thurber, Perelman, Hemingway), write and draw. His talents, he wrote, ‘developed out of sheer boredom those two years before I got my driver’s licence’. As a teenager he was, in his words, ‘skinny, scabby, giggly, gabby, frantic to be ...”

“... back to Leeds. So now in the evenings, after we’d finished our Russian lessons, I started to read for a scholarship again, biking in along Trumpington Road to work in the Cambridge Reference Library, a dark Victorian building behind the Town Hall (gaslit in memory, though it surely can’t have been), where George III was about to make his second ...”