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“... Last May Stephen Greenblatt, who was then president of the Modern Languages Association, the literary academic’s equivalent of the Teamsters, circulated a letter among its twenty thousand or so members. ‘Over the last few decades,’ he wrote, ‘most departments of language and literature have come to demand that junior faculty members produce, as a condition for being seriously considered for promotion to tenure, a full-length book published by a reputable press ...”

“... a solitary explorer, writing in 1918 for a war-weary public that could tolerate Victoriana only in small, savoury doses. He could not foresee the Victorian Revival: the huge appetite that would send a navy of researchers across the ocean of evidence, lowering buckets, trawling nets, and bringing to light more and more remains of that vanished civilisation. By ...”

“... and Tchelitchew, when they most needed it. Since his Oxford days – until an adverse review from Stephen Spender destroyed his confidence – he had published poetry (mostly his own) in luxurious limited editions. He also wrote one well-received novel, The Gardener who saw God. He spent the Second World War in the United States, largely in California, where ...”

“... which. Sometimes the human shapes have virtually disappeared under the paint or, as in Mr and Mrs Stephen Buckley, are converted into geometric forms; which doesn’t prevent the artist from saying: ‘the subject of the painting is simply a family group sitting round the fire in the evening.’ Other titles seem to promise that the picture will tell a ...”

“... dusted with scales as dense as the down on a chick. Oddest of the oddities was Hallucigenia, a small, spindly, spiky thing, yet with tubular organs, and what may or may not have been a head. The Cambrian ocean swarmed with sea-going arthropods: jointed-legged animals, now familiar as lobsters and lice, beetles and bees, spiders and scorpions. Their ...”

“... brings us back to Derry, perhaps to a particular family. The moral for her is ‘that people in small places make big mistakes. Not bigger than the mistakes of other people. But that there is less room for big mistakes in small places.’ Bad history, big mistakes. But what is the father’s mistake? That he thinks he is ...”

“... are meandering along the road you have chosen, then suddenly you are shoved up a side street where small enticements like crumbs laid down for a bird encourage you to believe that you are meant to travel in this direction though you see nothing familiar up ahead.’ No doubt it was by chance that she met Narendra, and then met him again, but her book ...”

“... his own characteristic way a great man. His son acknowledged this in the wry admiration with which Stephen Dedalus, asked by a friend to define him, speaks of his father in A Portrait of the Artist: ‘A medical student, an oarsman, a tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting politician, a small landlord, a ...”

“... a particularly insistent, and somewhat creepy, defender of royal authority was firmly established. Small wonder that Shakespeare confined him to a short sequence of dreary rhyming couplets at the end of his Wars of the Roses tetralogy: while Henry VII may have been as murderous as Richard III, he was nothing like as charming. Francis Bacon was ready to praise ...”

“... quick to spot the opportunities presented by the crisis. Doubters need only think of Jo Moore, Stephen Byers’s adviser, who got into trouble for suggesting that the attack on the World Trade Center provided a perfect opportunity to bury bad news. The battle-hardened ideologues who direct American foreign policy are no less cynical, and considerably more ...”

“... and 2000, as Vanessa enters her second year at Browick, an expensive boarding school in a small coastal town. She is a loner, from a working-class background in rural Maine, newly estranged from her best friend. An ironic detail: she is given a rape whistle for safety when she moves into her dorm.An academic adviser encourages her to take up an ...”

“... helpless child’, Gosse represented his father, the naturalist Philip Henry Gosse, as a small-minded bigot. In Edmund’s case, the not uncommon inclination to see ourselves as pitiful victims when we remember our childhood was magnified by the wish to imply a heroic escape from the tyranny of an eminent Victorian. Even Edmund, however, was taken ...”

“... he answered. He had been called by one Robert Constable to support a case for defamation against Stephen Pentecost. Pentecost’s witnesses said Tanner couldn’t be trusted: he was ‘a poore needy fellow’ with ‘a little cottage of his owne to dwell in … and noe other meanes to live’. One claimed he ‘could not find whereof he [Tanner] could levye ...”

“... friends and colleagues of Professor Barton, ranging from American luminaries like Jonas Barish and Stephen Orgel to newcomers like Richard Rowland (who contributes a thumpingly good piece on Heywood). Shakespeare is still the most challenging object in the literary canon, the most generous with meaning and, at the same time, the most apt to find out folly in ...”

“... took root in the public imagination. But it also set some eyes rolling. Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould were critical, and scientists across the board argued that Gaia smacked of teleology or even new-age mysticism. Can we really say a planet is an organism? What if life just evolves and there’s nothing that actually ‘seeks’ to keep it all ...”