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“... know next to nothing about the major Victorian publishers who were his partners. An exception is Richard Bentley, whose publishing career was extensively dealt with in Royal Gettmann’s A Victorian Publisher. There are objections to Peter Mann’s attempt to flatten out the distinction between literary and non-literary books. So, too, are there objections ...”

“... After many vicissitudes the Library of America was launched, under the direction of Daniel Aaron, Richard Poirier and Jason Epstein, who had worked with Wilson on the original abortive project. These people and their associates raised $600,000 from the Ford Foundation and then $1.2 million from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Then they went to work ...”

“... Infanta Margarita at the time. Or it may be symptomatic of the French interest in the English pastoral. Delacroix visited England in 1825, meeting both Lawrence and Richard Parkes Bonington; the trip inspired his outdoor portrait of Louis-Auguste Schwiter, which Degas later bought for his private ...”

“... pot never boils’. No one can wholly avoid hating ‘Old Daddy Franklin’, from whose Poor Richard’s Almanac these sayings come, especially if brought up to revere him in Public School, USA. Abraham Lincoln is the father of his people; George Washington, of his nation; but Benjamin Franklin – as it happens, a basically very decent man – hovers ...”

“... restlessness in After Hours with P.G. Wodehouse. Readers of this journal may recall a Diary by Richard Usborne (LRB, 4 October 1984) in which a determined investigation into the origins of Wodehouse’s use of ‘exquisite Tanagra figurine’ led to an evocation of the days when cut-price Boeotian coroplasts cluttered the shops of St Tropez. That Diary is ...”

“... Richard Feynman was the world’s number-one physicist (after Einstein), a well-known genius, a self-described ‘curious character’ who was involved in some of the formative events of 20th-century science: the Manhattan Project, quantum mechanics, the birth of quantum electrodynamics. Feynman’s mind roamed over every conceivable branch of Science ...”

“... used to be dismissed as a rather tiresome German habit. Now, I think, it has become embedded in English academic procedure. A festschrift is a gratifying compilation to receive and sets an interesting task for the contributor. But it is the most difficult type of book to review. Where is the underlying theme, the spirit that holds together, in this case, 24 ...”

“... well-founded suspicions about the value of moral philosophy as it has been practised in the English-speaking world since the days of Sidgwick. But Baier goes a step beyond these suspicions. It is her feminism, and the attention which feminism brings with it to specific, concrete, injustices, that have enabled her to do so. She offers not just ...”

“... tell him otherwise. In his conversations with Petacci he poured scorn on other Europeans: the English were ‘a disgusting people … They think only with their arses.’ ‘People who carry an umbrella,’ he added, ‘can never … understand the moral significance of war.’ The Spanish were ‘lazy, lethargic’, and the French a ‘hotchpotch of ...”

“... 1965 people had long been curious about this very famous man. Collections such as the one made by Richard Marsh and Tambimuttu for his 60th birthday in 1948 contained much pleasant anecdote, and there were respectful reminiscences in Allen Tate’s memorial volume of 1966. Meanwhile, off the page, there was some gossip about such matters as a putatively vast ...”

“... separation from the main currents of Continental thought. Southern suggests that the English schools he must have gone to would have been, even at Oxford, more provincial, less up-to-date, less specialised than the Paris ones, but they would also have been opener, contained more variety, and given more opportunity for a scholar to follow his own ...”

“... According to Hannibal Hamlin, in Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature (2004), English versions and translations of the Book of Psalms, the original book of Dave – supposedly written by King David, the Neim Z’mirot Yisrael (‘the sweet singer of Israel’) – ‘substantially shaped the culture of 16th and 17th-century England, resulting in creative forms as diverse as singing psalters, metrical psalm paraphrases, sophisticated poetic adaptations, meditations, sermons, commentaries, and significant allusions in poems, plays and literary prose by English men and women of varied social and intellectual backgrounds, accommodating biblical texts to their personal agendas, whether religious, political or aesthetic ...”

“... centuries.The first book printed in England to carry a date (though it probably wasn’t the first English printed book) was The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers, published by William Caxton in 1477, which grouped a miscellany of moral sayings under authorial headings. Many of the ‘quotations’ gathered in this ramshackle way would have made their ...”

“... But while in Germany the age of Classicism was succeeded by the age of learned historicism, the English were on the whole content to study Classical civilisation in outline, and shrank from the labour of learned and intensive study. Had Thomas Arnold not been cut off in his forties, things might have been different. Arnold belonged to a group of scholars ...”

“... Richard Yates faced some formidable obstacles: a broken home, tuberculosis, rampant alcoholism, divorce (twice), lack of recognition and manic depression – a combination that sent him, as he put it, ‘in and out of bughouses’. Even his triumphs seemed only to cause further distress. Though his first novel, Revolutionary Road (1961), was a critical success, sales were wretched, and he spent most of his working life in its shadow ...”