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“... and valuers, who submitted the stamp to the Royal Philatelic Society. On 30 January 1931, Thomas Hall, president of the Society, signed Certificate 14,764 of the Expert Committee, on which was written: ‘This stamp is a variety unchronicled and hitherto unknown to the Expert Committee. Having regard to the lapse of time since this stamp was issued, the ...”

“... John Lubbock, Liberal MP and social reformer (he introduced the bank holiday into law in 1871), was also the founding father of scientific anthropology and an obsessive entomologist. Of his many books, the most successful, Ants, Bees and Wasps, ran to 18 editions. In 1872, he presented a wasp that he had tamed (allegedly) to the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science ...”

“... friendship with the poet, which grew out of the Poetry International performances at the Festival Hall and elsewhere: so that some will feel that the book is facing in the wrong direction, that it is biased towards the less rewarding half of Auden’s life. Among the best things in the earlier chapters is a dry telling of the story of his temporary devotion ...”

“... reach’: she is an excellent pianist; she knows her Shakespeare, her Adam Smith and her John Stuart Mill. Like Henry Perowne in Saturday, she is enlightened and honourable: a quietly heroic technocrat who brings ‘reasonableness to hopeless situations’, a liberal-paternalist superego figure who sorts things out sensibly, by compulsion if ...”

“... room with its fevers and dreams. My old parents asleep, only a few yards across the hall, door open – lest I cry? Kleinzahler’s work has been praised for its ‘funky syntax’, but it is the delicacy and unobtrusiveness of the transitions achieved in these lines that seem to me crucial to many of his best effects: indeed, it is the ...”

“... tragedy. Denied the dignity of his tragic heroism, the noble Hamlet is a destructive force. In John Updike’s recent novel Gertrude and Claudius, Hamlet is still more unlovable. He is coldly manipulative, while his kingly father is reduced to a clumsy and egotistical bully. Updike is also engaged in an act of rehabilitation. But he turns his attention to ...”

“... shattering and glassy, all daggers and plans, while the woman in the wheelchair across the hall from my father’s room in the nursing home struggled all day to untangle an invisible ball of string, or some other endlessly tangled thing. Kasischke’s people are breakable or broken, tangled up with one another, unable to stand alone. Any page of Where ...”

“... out herds bred over centuries in Wales. Small farmers, whelped on Common Market subsidies and John Constable idylls, were being priced out of existence by agribusiness and Tesco. In time, the three of us – Karl, Seamus and me – decided to go out there partly to see what we could see but also as a way of spending time in company with people who shared ...”

“... just one, but virtually two generations older, since between us lay those – the cohort of Stuart Hall or Raphael Samuel – who had co-founded the New Left, from beginnings in the Fifties rather than the Forties. His looks assisted the illusion, the handsome features at once melodramatically mobile and geologically deep-set, a landscape of wild scarp and ...”

“... at Bootham School may have provoked an immediate countervailing effect in a cynical repudiation of John Bright; but in Birmingham Town Hall on 12 May 1958, exactly one hundred years after Bright had spoken there, Taylor concluded his own speech to a CND meeting by echoing Bright’s words (and shed his own tears with his old ...”

“... armour-plated car to Addis Ababa for the twenty-minute drive from the airport to the conference hall where the summit of the Organisation of African Unity was to be held. Halfway along one of the city’s boulevards, gunmen leapt from the crowds lining the streets and opened fire. A block downhill, a truck filled with explosives burst through. Mubarak had ...”

“... Peninsula in Docklands back to Farringdon. The floor above the platforms will become the ticket hall; above that is the ‘retail floor’, to be filled by Pret A Mangers and tie-on-the-fly boutiques. On its top deck, the finished station will have a garden and a restaurant with a ‘spectacular timber lattice roof’, and to one side, a large pond is ...”

“... of Ottoline Morrell of the Midlands’), in whose undistinguished Victorian mansion, Hambleton Hall, he was recuperating from TB. At Hambleton there were house parties to which Mrs Cooper invited noted intellectuals and society figures, enabling Coward to observe at close quarters the manners and morals of the upper classes. Soden describes Hambleton as ...”

“... John Wesley had a few words for Sterne: ‘For oddity, uncouthness, and unlikeness to all the world beside, I suppose the writer is without a rival.’ Well, something odd will do for ever if the sensation-seekers have their way; Tristram Shandy has outlasted Johnson’s Dictionary, even in the classroom. Sterne was the first author to come up with fully explicatable – as distinct from explicable – texts, in English fiction anyway ...”

“... simple identification of the praiser of Shakespeare, upon whose words the whole dedication turns: John Webster, in the note ‘To the Reader’ before The White Devil. Browning’s Elizabethanised play has its affinities with Webster: moreover, it was canny of him to emend Webster’s prefatory words so as to reduce them to a single-minded praise of ...”