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“... had housed John Verney’s cricket bats at the time of the English Civil War.Alexander Russell had read many of these earlier accounts of the city – Ross Burns, in his excellent summary of Aleppo’s long history, counts 17 separate accounts produced in the late 17th century alone – and he didn’t think the previous descriptions were outdated; he uses the ...”

“... that now at least (the nostalgic 1950s may be another matter) the book is more bought than read, more recommended than enjoyed. It is hard to imagine that, for all its promised glimpse of mythical Cambridge, many modern readers persevere for more than a few pages before being overwhelmed by its complex cast of late Victorian characters, who – like ...”

“... Guevara was arrested by the Mexican police and interrogated. According to Anderson, who has read the interrogation notes kept by the police, he ‘openly admitted his Communism and declared his belief in the need for armed revolutionary struggle, not only in Cuba, but throughout Latin America’. Fidel, always keen to emphasise his nationalist and ...”

“... William Sancroft, who acceded to her request for charity and put her in touch with the publisher Richard Wilkin, who printed almost all of her works; and the one-time Oxford philosopher and theologian John Norris, who encouraged her thinking and who in 1695 published their Letters Concerning the Love of God, thus saving Astell’s letters to him from the ...”

“... ascribed jokes and smart sayings to well-known figures such as the poet John Skelton or the fool Richard Tarleton. Jest-book-style anecdotes were often transcribed alongside more serious quotations in manuscript notebooks compiled by individual readers. So in 1601, the lawyer John Manningham recorded in what’s usually called his ‘diary’ (though really ...”

“... on Principia Mathematica. Professor Lowe was indebted to Russell, not only for the opportunity to read these letters, but also for Russell’s personal recollections of Whitehead, communicated in an interview when Russell was aged 93, for the information contained in the first two volumes of Russell’s Autobiography and most of all for the charming memoir of ...”

“... long public letters of exasperated explanation. Against this background, it is difficult to read Bitter Fame without acknowledging a strong dose of prejudice, suspicion, even hostility. So much of Anne Stevenson’s material has already come filtered through the earlier biographical writing, Letters Home, the Journals (published in the United States but ...”

“... time I was working, one floor below his, in collaboration with his formidable ideological critic Richard Lewontin – the second of the remarkable triumvirate who inhabit the Museum (the third, in the basement, is Stephen Jay Gould). Lewontin claims that when the conflict between them was at its most intense, Wilson wouldn’t even get into the lift between ...”

“... it was tightly plotted, suspense-driven, lavishly sexist and racist. In fact, though it is often read as a children’s book, it isn’t; nor is it run of the mill. It is the book which sowed the seed for John Buchan’s Richard Hannay, for Indiana Jones and James Bond, and though less slick than its successors, its ...”

“... never have been published at all had it not been for the intercession of the poet and translator Richard Howard, who was introduced to White by a friend who had met Howard at a West Village pick-up bar. Howard liked White’s manuscript, suggested revisions and eventually persuaded Random House to publish it. The publisher demanded that the ending be changed ...”

“... the life of their mechanic . . . and the recipes of the meals they enjoyed’. Mackersey has read too widely in this literature, and his narrative is so laden down with extraneous detail that it never gets off the ground. He claims, for example, that he wants to enlarge ‘our understanding of the family of flight’ by revealing that Orville didn’t ...”

“... poems. His work exhibits little of the ostentatious virtuosity of better-known formalists such as Richard Wilbur and Anthony Hecht, with whom he is so often, and rather unfortunately, grouped. Rather, Justice’s poems delicately induce the hypnotic state that Bishop described as her artistic ideal in a letter to Anne Stevenson: ‘What one seems to want in ...”

“... of sens interdit signs (as exotic as red phoneboxes), took seminars on the Communist Party, and read Sartre but not Beauvoir, who wasn’t thought suitable. They were strict about only talking French to each other, believing that if they were caught chatting in English they would be sent home, but lax about other things. The comtesse didn’t enforce the ...”

“... have been finished, and is, in fact, a compilation made by others. It is, his excellent translator Richard Zenith writes, ‘a depository ... various books (yet ultimately one book), with various authors (yet ultimately one author)’. The narrator of most of the book – a series of diary entries and reflections, mostly undated and without context – sounds ...”

“... with white faces and heavily kohled eyes hurried out towards Praed Street’ – the book is best read with a streetfinder close to hand – ‘as if hastening to appointments with abortionists in seedy consulting rooms behind the Edgware Road’. Alas, times have changed since 1967, when the novel was first published, as much in Bayswater and environs as in ...”