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“... were easily built on to accommodate genes and mutations, recent work has been more challenging. Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, for example, used the spandrels of St Mark’s in Venice, which exist as a necessary by-product of the process of mounting a dome on rounded arches, as a way of illustrating the anti-adaptationist idea that certain features ...”

“... the BLM project shares with these other catalogues a central interest in the 19th century, and marks another forward leap in charting what Michael Wolff twenty years ago called the ‘golden stream’ of Victorian periodical writing. More than most directories, the BLM series can be read as literary history. Each volume shows lines of ...”

“... dialogue and he will not ascribe unspoken thoughts to his characters. When he uses quotation marks, he is quoting directly from the writings of others or from actual interviews with survivor’s of the same storm, relatives and friends of the drowned men, or people who have experienced what they might have experienced as they suffered their final ...”

“... has ‘never existed, he is only some hundreds of words, some punctuation, sentences, paragraphs, marks on the page. If I had conceived his motives as a psychological study I would have said so. But I didn’t go in for motives. I never have.’ These sentiments are a very accurate rendering of the fashionable cant of the time in which this story is set: but ...”

“... a philosophical idiom in saying so. Like philosophy, anti-philosophy is for the philosophers. Stephen Toulmin’s work over the past half-century shares sensibilities and rhetorical styles with the later Wittgenstein and (more recently) with Rorty: there’s something wrong with modern academic philosophy (especially the philosophy of morals and of ...”

“... She applauds Rita Dove for the way her poems ‘work’ (a verb she puts in quotation marks). In a fine essay on Charles Simic, she notices that although his poems deal with childhood traumas, they are not confessional; ‘the material, we may say, remains psychologically unanalysed while being thoroughly poetically analysed (by image, by ...”

“... in the engagement, or ‘troth-plighting’, of their daughter Mary to one of their apprentices, Stephen Belott. Some years later Belott sued Mountjoy for an unpaid dowry of £60, and Shakespeare was among those called to give evidence at the Court of Requests in Westminster. He did so on 11 May 1612, though – somewhat conveniently for Mountjoy – he ...”

“... is heard in concerted passages, and Doyle has a range of dashes, longer dashes, and exclamation marks which act as a kind of musical notation. The language itself, like James Kelman’s Glaswegian, has its repetitions and limitations, but is subtle when you get to know it. Jimmy Sr notices at their dinner, when they’re talking about what’s happening ...”

“... of the editorial process by reproducing many of them with their original masking and cropping marks. What the photographs show is often more rumpled, old-fashioned, and, above all, more various, than the artefacts in the exhibition would lead you to expect. Herring girls and chorus girls, racing men and unemployed ship-builders, don’t look like ...”

“... The Horizon survey, in fact, serves as a model for this new investigation. In 1946, George Orwell, Stephen Spender, Herbert Read and Julian Maclaren-Ross each testified that he could manage on £1000 a year net. V.S. Pritchett needed a bit more. Elizabeth Bowen raised a few eyebrows at the time by confessing that ‘I would like to have £3500 a year ...”

“... meals. In the middle of reading one such bulletin, I rang the Taylors’ home to take his proof marks. Eva Taylor answered the phone: she was home and she was better. What had hospital been like? ‘Very interesting. But – I had homesickness.’ Had she perhaps kept a diary? ‘Of course.’ And here it is. Life with Alan has not been Eva Haraszti’s ...”

“... exception that proves the rule. ‘It was that I had no gift. I had no natural talent,’ he tells Stephen Schiff in a recent New Yorker profile. ‘I had to learn it. Having to learn it, I became my own man.’ And, in A Way in the World: ‘I had had to learn to write from scratch, almost in the way a man has to learn to walk and use his body again after a ...”

“... representative in literature, of a time, a milieu, a genre, a creative kin-group – towards what Stephen Greenblatt, contributor here of a fascinating little piece on the textuality of death in the 16th century, calls ‘cultural poetics’. This giant volume has, however, nearly as many different contributors as there are chapters and they follow no one ...”

“... a nation, but even in comparison with Scotland and Wales) is that it doesn’t have the formal marks of national identity acquired even by Iceland or Finland, Luxembourg or Albania. It has no national anthem – ‘God save the Queen’ is played at football matches, but that is shared with other parts of the UK, who, however, don’t play it (except for ...”

“... As I drive a Fiesta, I applaud the common sense of the Hungarians. Hungary still has all the marks of a proud traditional state. It has an uninterrupted history for almost a thousand years. The actual date of foundation is 896, and since then the Hungarian state has always maintained some sort of existence. The Hungarian Parliament claims to be older ...”