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“... the eyes are abominable, and about the mouth. Eyebrows making one circle, if meeting, or close and straight, are equally bad . . . Eyes long, and wide between the eyebrows; and no wrinkles in the forehead when they laugh, or about the mouth, are signs of bad luck and duplicity. Eyes all zigzag are full of lies. A low, flat forehead is bad; so are uneven ...”

“... Last month​ , Michael Gove dispatched Ian Paisley Junior, the Democratic Unionist Party MP for North Antrim, with brutal indifference. Brexit was done, the DUP had been done over, and everyone could see that it was entirely the party’s own fault. On 11 February, Gove spoke from the House of Commons while Paisley Junior sat at his computer in Ballymena ...”

“... abdomen, frozen in death, a microscopic Pompeii. Zoom in further and you can see structures straight out of a biology textbook: mitochondria, bubble-shaped fat reservoirs, even cellular nuclei. Poinar and Hess later speculated that if a mosquito were preserved in amber just after it had sucked blood from a dinosaur, it might be possible to recover the ...”

“... disclose to the wider world and to ourselves.Mandeville was born in Rotterdam in 1670. His father, Michael, was a physician, and Bernard followed in his footsteps, studying medicine and philosophy at Leiden. His thesis in 1691 concerned the effects of digestion on mental processes. This early interest in psychology persisted, and he chose hypochondria and ...”

“... made me a suit last year. My first suit and probably my last. 3 March. Lunch at L’Etoile with Michael Palin and Barry Cryer, Elena Salvoni still presiding there at lunchtime and though she’s 90 not looking much different from when I first got to know her at Bianchi’s in the 1960s. Barry as usual fires off the jokes which are almost his trademark but ...”

“... to the Communist Manifesto). He writes rudely about Acton’s pontificating – it leads straight to 1066 and All That – and he is not much less rude about Burckhardt. His own grasp is sometimes weaker when he has to tackle a larger theme than usual – say, ‘Fascism’. There are signs that he is occasionally uneasy about this: he can say ...”

“... analogies between the public and private accounts make one realise the power of each. To plunge straight into Unger’s book is like viewing a picture from too close: you need to appreciate the aesthetics of the whole before you value each part. Even his vocabulary, with its terms of art and its apparent preciosities, makes much more sense once you realise ...”

“... a series of brief, knockabout, allegedly comic exchanges with Plomley, the actor manqué, as the straight man – a role he clearly enjoyed:Plomley (reads): ‘Vic Oliver – comedian, lightning club manipulator, violinist and comedy trick cyclist. Light work done with a horse and van.’ Is this a photograph of you?Oliver: Don’t you think it’s like ...”

“... her parentage at her baptism 11 years after her mother’s death, and the parish register for St Michael, Queenhithe, in the City of London, records: ‘Laura daughter of William Jerdan and Letitia Elizabeth Landon’. Asked for her father’s profession or rank, Laura appears to have been unsure what to say. The beginnings of ‘Manufacturer’ and ...”

“... transparent, had arrived at a point where most of their activity was secret and mysterious. Enter Michael Lewis. Flash Boys is a number of things, one of the most important being an exposition of exactly what is going on in the stock market; it’s a one-stop shop for an explanation of high-frequency trading (hereafter, HFT). The book reads like a ...”

“... book of adaptations and translations from European poetry called Imitations. In it, Lowell steps straight into the perennial themes of classical and modern poetry, desire, loss, mortality, eheu fugaces, war. He is Achilles’ blood-lust, Sappho’s pining, the tributes of Mallarmé to Gautier, and Pasternak to Akhmatova. At the same time, poetry becomes ...”

“... memory, like a motto, or an old tune. My slightly frivolous title, ‘What Henry Knew’, takes us straight to Henry James, of course, and the (feeble) joke is meant, among other things, to indicate that I recognise how obvious a move this is, once we have started on the question of literature and knowledge. It was James who wrote so eloquently, in relation to ...”

“... or elegant.‘For many gay men, fucking satisfies a constellation of needs that are dealt with in straight society outside the arena of sex,’ Richard Goldstein argued in the Village Voice in 1983. ‘For gay men, sex, that most powerful implement of attachment and arousal, is also an agent of communion, replacing an often hostile family and even shaping ...”

“... it was a paper ‘written by Central European Jews for Central African blacks’ would have flown straight over my head. I didn’t know that it had championed the decolonisation of Africa or opposed the Suez invasion in a famous editorial that described Britain and France as gangsters. What I remember were the things that made us laugh: the column by Paul ...”

“... a lecturer’s spoken words (perhaps with the aid of automatic captioning) and copied large chunks straight into their essay.From the perspective of students raised in a digital culture, the anti-plagiarism taboo no doubt seems to be just one more academic hang-up, a weird injunction to take perfectly adequate information, break it into pieces and refashion ...”