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“... verbs of vague application’, how she recently transported all her books to Berlin. There’s also a PayPal button by which you can ‘donate’ $1.15 to her when you buy The Last Samurai second-hand, thus paying the author roughly the same as she would get in royalties from a book sold new. ‘The norm in traditional publishing is for a second-hand book ...”

“... novelists, poets, essayists, critics, historians, scholars and all-purpose men of letters, it also spanned a wide range of literary levels, including representatives of the popular and middlebrow markets as well as the critically acclaimed, extending from the fastidious Hardy through several gradations to popular romancers such as Caine and Locke. (We are ...”

“... me do that.’ I carry, you see, not just the notes of whatever chapter I am working on, but also my diary, and those past diaries, kept in A4 spiral notebooks, that I don’t want my current partner to read while I’m away: I think carefully about what would happen if I were to die on a journey, leaving behind me a deskful of ragged prose and ...”

“... diet of cliché a little) and reveals that she has Something to Hide. And yes, the blonde contessa also somehow manages a sex scene with the eunuch: ‘“Don’t stop,” she breathed softly’ – oh please do, I groaned loudly – ‘her wild golden hair flying across the pillow.’ The painting (is it a fake? Is it the same as the heavily restored portrait ...”

“... by 12 February and a million ‘friends’ by the November anniversary of the Origin. The group also planned a mass ‘Happy Birthday, Darwin’ sing-along, but I don’t think this actually happened. Then there were the Darwin-themed T-shirts, teddy bears, bobbleheads, tote bags, coffee mugs, fridge magnets, mouse mats, scatter cushions and pet bowls; the ...”

“... work on Irish folklore was, as Foster points out, a collaboration with Lady Gregory.Lady Gregory also wrote plays, which had to do in various ways with ‘the soil’. The Coole Park she came to after her marriage in 1880 must have been haunted by the Great Famine, which began with the failure of the potato crop in certain parts of Ireland in 1845. It is ...”

“... big events were the classes with the master. One of these classes is memorably imagined in A.S. Byatt’s novel Possession. The dour Professor Blackadder, shackled for life to the interminable editing of the works of Randolph Ash, has his poetic faculties cauterised in his youth by Leavis’s teaching. In a Downing College room, ‘the lean and agile ...”

“... engagements, stayed in bed saying she felt she might be getting flu. This was uncharacteristic and also not true; it was actually so that she could get on with her book. ‘The Queen has a slight cold’ was what the nation was told, but what it was not told and what the Queen herself did not know, was that this was only the first of a series of ...”