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“... was ordained. The same year, his father bought for him the living of New Brentford, worth £200 or more. The long-term consequence of this was that Horne was debarred as a clergyman from the two careers at which he had the talent and inclination to excel, the law and Parliamentary politics, for he spoke well and wrote better. During the 1760s, he took every ...”

“... awful’. Early memoirists take us further with Swift’s character, but only so far. His godson Thomas Sheridan recalled that ‘he always appeared to the world in a mask, which he never took off but in the company of his most intimate friends.’ Yet this unmasking, such as it was, only seems to have confused things further. The most memorable assessments ...”

“... know whether to laugh or to cry at the procedure, and two Colombian Indians are reported by Hugh Thomas as saying, in 1515, that the Pope must have been drunk when he divided between the Spanish and the Portuguese so much land which wasn’t his to give. The procedure was not simply absurd, however. Or even ‘at once ridiculous and touching’, as ...”

“... He went first to Heidelberg to learn German, then in 1892 enrolled as a medical student at St Thomas’s Hospital. His first book, Liza of Lambeth, published in 1897, when he was 23, owed much to Maupassant and Zola. It was a grimy realist novel about the South London underclass he’d come into contact with through the hospital – a first instance of ...”

“... the brief time this theoretical pasting took to compose and the age of the paster (would it be more acceptable coming from a 63-year-old?), the second half of Jack’s sentence decisively negates the first. Especially if the book in question is being lavishly praised elsewhere. Of course, if you’re its author or publisher, or the author’s best ...”

“... A casual player might respond to an opponent’s ZO by saying: ‘Zo? What does that mean?’ A more advanced player would say nothing, and stick a D in front of it. In English, zo and dzo are alternative spellings of zho, a hybrid cow found in the Himalayas, the offspring of a domestic horned cow and a yak (the female is known as a zhomo). In English, zo ...”

“... hit the button.’ Not the button marked ‘launch baby whale,’ but the one that makes you sell more copies than OK!, Hello and Heat. Ennis thinks that ‘the celebrity thing is bound to bottom-out’ because ‘too many people are trying to jump onto it.’ When it does, she’ll no doubt head happily off to edit Cetacean Obstetrics Monthly; but what will ...”

“... life-threatening circumstances. If excitement is what a commercial pilot is after, he’s more likely to find it working bush planes in Africa, flying supplies and international aid workers to remote hospitals, or running drugs through South and Central America or over Eastern Europe. Langewiesche admonishes those who believe the landing on the Hudson ...”

“... written a study of the subject, though there is Barbara Trapido’s novel Brother of the More Famous Jack, and it’s one of the themes of John Lanchester’s first novel, The Debt to Pleasure. Among the many irritations must be to find yourself always referred to as so-and-so’s brother or sister, and to be written about as such by smart-arses. Ali ...”

“... had an equivalent amount of random content removed. Two controls were required because there’s more than twice as much positive content as negative on Facebook. Posts were defined as either negative or positive depending on whether or not they included certain words, determined by a software package called Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count. Its ...”

“... on the situation in Venezuela was printed in this journal. So no one can accuse us of anything more base than indiscretion for pointing these things out.) Still, as somebody advised in 1890, ‘never turn the spoon over and look at yourself in the bowl; it is the action of a clown.’The Diary of Eva Braun, with a commentary by Alan Bartlett, is appearing ...”

“... I must declare an interest in this particular Thomas. Dylan, R.S., above all the heart-inscribed Edward – these I admire, respect, claim. D.M. I have had little luck with. Our relationship began with the publication some years ago of The Flute Player, a novel which, I had heard, concerned the life of Osip Mandelstam ...”

“... appear somewhat later, in the mid-Seventies, and is only now reaching full flower. Its origins lie more in the conservative revival of those years than in the leftist climate which produced the re-interpretation of the Cold War. But the new view of Eisenhower has been no less a part of the broad assault on mainstream liberalism than the new view of the Cold ...”

“... overtures from Francis I promising a lucrative professorship. But Erasmus and Budé made it up, more or less. Why were Renaissance letter-writers so indiscreet? Their letters show that their message-bearers and servants were feckless, inclined to tipple or get into wrong company. When scholars were on friendly terms, it was courteous not to publish their ...”

“... of Mary Queen of Scots wasn’t written by Hilary Mantel or Antonia Fraser. It was written more than 140 years ago by James Anthony Froude, whose History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada put the Tudor show on the road. That wasn’t Froude’s only legacy. His Life of Carlyle, published in 1885, inaugurated modern ...”