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“... The first letter​ – five lines written to his father in April 1943 when John McGahern was eight years old – could take an entire book to gloss:Dear Daddy,        Thanks very much for the pictures. I had great fun reading them. Come to see us soon. We got two goats. Uncle Pat does not like them. Will you bring over my bicycle please and games ...”

“... preface to this celebratory volume of essays presented to Dame Helen Gardner on her 70th birthday, John Carey apologises for the fact that the topics discussed are restricted to 16th and 17th-century English literature. Dame Helen’s latest book, after all, was The Composition of ‘The Four Quartets’. Eliot’s presence, though, still hovers over ...”

“... In 1548, four years after the Princess finished the translation, it was published by the Reformer John Bale, one of Elizabeth’s mentors, under the purposively improved title, A Godly Meditation of the Christian Soul. Bale had his reasons, as Shell shows, and he encoded them (nothing was then written entirely en clair, it seems) in the learned Epistle ...”

“... approach to unification differs from the reductionism of Wilson, which seems to say that the laws of biology can be distilled to those of chemistry, which can be further reduced to those of physics. Boulding’s is a more ‘holistic’ approach. He believes that some phenomena are more fruitfully studied as a whole rather than as a set of chemical or ...”

“... why. Gallery dealers, fellow painters, school friends, college friends, relatives and former in-laws – all are interviewed. Alison Lurie provides transcripts of their answers, not Polly’s questions, these transcripts forming an almost impersonal running commentary on Polly’s investigations. Alongside them go Polly’s own journeys and ...”

“... vernacular anti-Semitism which had first excused and then validated everything from the Nuremberg Laws to the gas chambers and might readily have made collaborators of families like Harvey’s if Hitler had crossed the Channel. But it didn’t feel like that either to him or to me. What it presented me with was my first existential dilemma. If I now told ...”

“... as anyone’s – and insisted that the English, by virtue of their religion, literature and laws, were as Jewish as he was. Douglas Hurd and Edward Young’s Disraeli: or, the Two Lives, and Robert O’Kell’s Disraeli: The Romance of Politics diverge when they come to Disraeli’s Byronism. Hurd and Young wave it aside: ‘Disraeli aspired to a career ...”

“... Fish was subject to similar pressures – like milk, mackerel was exempt from Sunday trading laws in recognition of how quickly the product spoiled. Not everything sold by traders was spanking fresh, and there were common complaints about hawkers’ sharp practices – boiling oranges so they’d look fresher, or washing cabbage leaves in fresh water to ...”

“... Both here and in his earlier study of the Edinburgh Review and his first volume on Macaulay, John Clive shows no desire to use or manipulate the Victorians. He merely wants to understand them better. And what he comes to understand, as G.M. Young did before him, is that the Victorian resolutely refuses to behave in the way we think Victorians ...”

“... he warned. ‘The wave of population will break upon that shore, and roll back upon itself.’ John Maynard Keynes, who made no secret of his admiration for Malthus, attributed the First World War and the Russian Revolution to overpopulation and global competition for food. The ‘great acceleration’ of the second half of the 20th century, a period of ...”

“... Mr Gray’, or some equivalent. By one account, when, near the end of his life, Gray visited St John’s College to meet the son of an acquaintance, ‘every College man took off his cap as he passed, a considerable number having assembled in the quadrangle to see Mr Gray, who was seldom seen.’ Gray managed the difficult feat of becoming admired, even ...”

“... democracy it was all the more difficult to abolish slavery, since ‘the persons who make the laws in that country are persons who have slaves themselves.’The very ‘freedom of the free’, Smith pointed out, helped to produce ‘the great oppression of the slaves’. Johnson succumbs to another kind of oversimplification when he attempts to read ...”

“... in Norbert Elias’s The Civilising Process, and doubtless elsewhere). Two centuries ago, when John Debrett became a miscellaneous publisher, his contemporary advice-givers had moved on to new fields; for example, offering a tip or two to a young lady newly ravaged by smallpox on how to hold on to her lover, with complementary advice to a gallant robbed of ...”

“... dis/continuity constrained and enabled authors as well as anthologists. By subduing themselves to laws governing, e.g., tai and yu (‘essence’ and ‘attribute’) and the arrangement of loaded words (‘pine’, ‘rose’, ‘late cherry blossom’), renga poets such as Basho developed skills inseparable from compilation. What held between poems became ...”

“... daily basis and send them to London to be tabulated and – somehow – synthesised to reveal the laws of the air. John Locke was one of scores of weather-watchers who interleaved their observations with entries in journals and commonplace book jottings. The diurnal rhythms of most of an adult life could be set by the ...”