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“... or abroad. Poets liked him. Seamus Heaney of course liked him, but so did others as dissimilar as Joseph Brodsky, Andrew Motion and (one of his first translators) Robert Bly. Poets were drawn to translate him too: fellow Northerners like Robin Fulton (for a long time now a resident of Norway, though 48 years ago for small reward he was teaching me geography ...”

“... advertisements, and trying to master the finances of printing and distribution. At night he read Joseph Conrad and other classic authors, and after midnight spoke for hours on the telephone with his father about politics, history and the stock markets.’ Once he made it to the big leagues via his adventures with Argus, Black began to expand his portfolio of ...”

“... his five Englishmen (who actually include two Welshmen) are not all equally famous. Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, and perhaps Edmund Law, need no introduction. But William Worthington and John Gordon have not previously been placed in the august company of the Humes and Priestleys. Worthington figures briefly in the DNB ...”

“... Britain; and as for his direct influence, as one observes it in Sickert, Wilson Steer, Gwen John and Victor Pasmore, it is hard not to think of it as beneficent and inspiring. People sometimes rebuke Whistler, as they rebuke Pound, for being noisy and obstreperous, but the polemics – the Ruskin trial, and the ‘Ten O’Clock’ lecture (reprinted in ...”

“... home was ‘the rendezvous of all good and honest spirits ... it seemed a kind of university.’ John Selden and the historian John Speed acknowledged their profound debts to him. Among many literary acquaintances, Ben Jonson was a close friend over a long period. Like Cotton, Jonson was a pupil at Westminster of the great ...”

“... this man go, you are no friend to Caesar; any man who claims to be king is defying Caesar” ’ (John 19.7). Since the 18th century, however, it has been argued that this allegation of a ‘frame-up’ is itself a frame-up – whose victims are the Jews. If Jesus, as many Gospel passages indicate, did indeed claim to be ‘King of the Jews’, is it possible ...”

“... on the subject of country houses was, if anything, anti-aristocratic. The extraordinary success of Joseph Nash’s The Mansions of England in the Olden Time (1839), and the ensuing cult of houses like Knole, Haddon, Hardwick, Hatfield and Wollaton, stemmed from Nash’s depiction of these great houses as the background for scenes of Christmas revelry where the ...”

“... situation now is very different. At the age of 78, and with the possible exception of John Adams, Glass can be regarded as the most famous – certainly the most successful – of all the composers who emerged from the minimalist revolution of the 1960s. Perhaps because he shed the technical apparatus of such iconic pieces as Reich’s Drumming ...”

“... 16th century. And when Sherlock Holmes in the ‘Adventure of the Norwood Builder’ (1903) greets John Hector McFarlane, who has just burst unceremoniously into 221b Baker Street, with the words ‘you mentioned your name, as if I should recognise it, but I assure you that, beyond the obvious facts that you are a bachelor, a solicitor, a Freemason, and an ...”

“... mind between science and revolution. The great experimental chemist of the previous generation, Joseph Priestley, had believed it self-evident that the progress of reason and science would lead to a general reformation of religion and politics: ‘The English hierarchy (if there be anything unsound in its constitution) has equal reason to tremble even at an ...”

“... to commit suicide, but the coroner decided it was an accident. While the premature deaths of, say, John Berryman and Delmore Schwartz and Sylvia Plath seemed somehow implicit in the trajectory of their careers, there was nothing remotely maudit about Jarrell, until the last couple of years of his life, when the approach of his 50th birthday induced a bout of ...”

“... are catalogued in The Road to Wellville (1993), a novel about the cereal manufacturer Dr John Harvey Kellogg – inventor, in Boyle’s phrase, of ‘gastrically correct foods’. He makes surreal play of Kellogg’s determination to force his guests at the Battle Creek Sanitarium to eat his nutritional products: ‘Nut Lisbon Steak, Protose ...”

“... John Sutherland’s pithy, cynical Life of Scott is very much a biography of our time: irreverent, streetwise, set foursquare in a ‘real world’ in which careers achieve money and power and character is at least 51 per cent image. In its worldly wisdom it resembles the first of its kind, John Gibson Lockhart’s pioneering five-volume Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott (1837-8), though the drift of the two Lives is in opposite directions ...”

“... will be the old age of the government if it is thus early decrepit!’ the French ambassador Joseph Fauchet sniffed in 1792. The ‘whole nation’ is ‘a stock-jobbing, speculating, selfish people. Riches alone here fix consideration.’ Those early American foibles – cash, class and corruption – are at the heart of our present troubles. The most ...”

“... New York and the other some weeks later in Salzburg, in a lean, semi-staged concert rendition by John Eliot Gardiner and his period-instrument Orchestre Romantique et Révolutionnaire. This was followed, again in Salzburg, by Georg Solti conducting several staged performances of Fidelio, and in New York by Kurt Masur and the NY Philharmonic doing one ...”