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“... worked up by the imagination in order to satisfy private dreams. Conan Doyle started to invent Dr Watson and Sherlock Holmes while waiting dejectedly for custom in his own surgery. Not only do cases or patients turn up at the Baker Street sitting-room with dramatic regularity, but each presents its own fascinating problem, which only the fantasy couple are ...”

“... always like that for him,’ the child mused when, in the film’s opening sequence, Peter Parker, Spider-Man’s ‘real’ teenage self, missed the school bus. In that one remark the child encapsulated what the director and producers had got so right in casting Tobey Maguire as the misfit character, and in their gentle faithfulness throughout ...”

“... of academic life in general, but one can guess at more particular reasons. Not long ago Sir Peter Medawar remarked that when the momentous DNA discoveries were being made there were plenty of people in the English faculties of universities quite as clever as Crick and Watson – but Crick and ...”

“... If Pope’s Dunciad, Johnson’s ‘London’, Blake’s Songs of Experience and Shelley’s ‘Peter Bell’ are set before it. Thomson takes his place in a tradition linking the Augustans and Romantics with the Moderns: a metropolitan tradition reflecting the state of Britain. This was not noticed because Tennyson, Browning and Arnold provided a greater ...”

“... of its influence. Pioneered in the early 20th century by Edward Lee Thorndike, Clark Hull and J.B. Watson, behaviourism rejected explanations of action in terms of mysterious inner processes such as ‘thought’ and tried to explain behaviour purely in terms of the organism’s conditioning by experience. By the middle of the century, the behaviourist ...”

“... series circles back to earlier cases, with the inexplicable disappearances and reappearances of Watson’s shadowy wives underlining the lack of any consistent chronological order. That freedom from linearity was Conan Doyle’s undoing. Unlike a novel, a series of cases has no built in conclusions: nothing prevents an author from making more money by ...”

“... It might almost be mistaken for the dénouement of an early Sherlock Holmes story: Dr John H. Watson describing the scene in an East End police station when Holmes literally unmasks the man with an old scar running across his face from eye to chin which turned up his lip into a perpetual grimace, a ‘crippled wretch of hideous aspect’ who hid out in a ...”

“... as the reference of a word which used to be about the business of analysing such things. Peter Washington’s book is a polemic against the viewpoint which is often spoken of as if it were quite simply modern theory of literature rather than the particular critical ideology that it is. While his title accepts the identification of theory with this ...”

“... about Orwell, including the memoir of Richard Rees and The Unknown Orwell by William Abrahams and Peter Stansky (lamed by the late Soni Orwell’s refusal of permission to quote), and, more recently, the expansive Life by Bernard Crick, at first authorised by the widow to emphasise her rejection of Stansky and Abrahams, and later de-authorised by her to ...”

“... and his religious opinions.’ Whether that applied to women as well is less easy to say. Nor does Peter Raby, in an admirably balanced and judicious biography, have much light to throw upon the question. However unusual he was as an individual, Butler belonged to a well-defined Victorian male grouping, whose representatives in literary terms would range from ...”

“... of the readers into ‘poetry voice’ recall The Borough, a ‘theatrical journey’ through Peter Grimes staged at the Aldeburgh Festival in 2013. It, too, was experienced through headphones that weren’t quite noise-cancelling, so that the recorded sounds – waves, gulls, footsteps on shingle – merged and swapped places with the same sounds in real ...”

“... we really mean when we talk so freely of fictions. Can we refer to Sherlock Holmes in the way that Watson can? No, because we are referring to a character, he is referring to a man. Conan Doyle does not refer to either of them, he ‘fictionally projects’ them. A character, say, Chichikov, is a ‘person-kind’ – in this case, the Chichikov-in-Dead Souls ...”

“... aversion to speculation beyond what is justified by the experimental results. When Crick and Watson lounged around, arguing about problems for which there existed as yet no firm experimental data instead of getting down to the bench and doing experiments, I thought they were wasting their time. However, like Leonardo, they sometimes achieved most when ...”

“... Peter Hennessy has chosen for the dust jacket of Never Again a picture that exactly captures the mood of 1945. A returning British serviceman is being welcomed home by his wife and small son. ‘Home’ is a pre-fab, decked for the occasion with Union Jacks. The wife is wearing a neat, knee-length utility-model dress ...”

“... My first encounter with Peter Medawar revealed something about us both. When he was the new Mason Professor of Zoology in the University of Birmingham I was a student at University College, Nottingham, and one of my tasks as president of the student Zoological Society was to give votes of thanks to visiting speakers ...”