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“... which involve mythological personages in his infancy, either as his parents or his early tutors. Joseph Warton’s poem ‘The Enthusiast’ of 1744 pictures a baby Shakespeare who, apparently left unattended by his negligent mortal parents despite the proximity of a deep river, is abducted and taken to a cave by Fancy, where he is subjected to ...”

“... of tasting-notes, the nonce-Scottish design, the resourceful, somehow tailor-made unpleasantness. Joseph Brodsky used to say: aesthetics before ethics. How, then, given that one pub is described as having ‘muted ragu tones’, and another a ‘burgundy honeycomb’ of a ceiling, can we possibly hope for even passable behaviour from any of the regulars, who ...”

“... for respecting the world, and they are the image of a world of respect.Edward’s first book, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (1966), elaborated the idea that becoming a writer was a project rather than a career, that you poured yourself into a series of works which in turn defined who you were. His second book, Beginnings (1975), exploring ...”

“... his father (as, in The School for Scandal, the balance between the wastrel Charles and the puritan Joseph echoes that between Richard and his brother). Naturally, ‘within the insistent artifice’ of The Rivals, Sheridan represents ‘almost everything that had happened to him in the previous two years’; while the marriage between Sir Peter Teazle and his ...”

“... up our stories and in terms of feeling really bad about it afterwards. This new memoir from Michael Finkel streaks across a firmament already glittering with apologetic precedents. Stephen Glass, once a popular and ambitious young thing at the New Republic, invented email addresses and whole companies to hide his deceit, and later went on to invent a ...”

“... One day in 1993, I found myself on a bus in Oxford with Michael Foot. He looked shambolic even by my standards – donkey jacket, stick, long hair all over the place. But nobody minded. You don’t often see leading politicians on a bus and passenger after passenger came up to say hello. He smiled and was the soul of friendliness ...”

“... way of saying that he was for ten years a foreign correspondent of the FT; his authority (like Joseph Roth’s, say) is altogether deeper, more committed, more structural, than that of journalism. He reminds me of Washington DC in Lowell’s distich: ‘The stiff spokes of this wheel / touch the sore spots of the earth.’ It is a ...”

“... and the postponement of a physical incarnation of the Analytical Engine reflects this. But in 1855 Joseph Whitworth, a leading engineer, offered to build the machine, on terms generous to Babbage. The latter declined the offer, apparently because government help would also be required. This strange and surely instructive moment is not explained by Mr ...”

“... perfectly well involve huge and catastrophic feelings, for the reader as well, as witness, say, Joseph Roth’s The Emperor’s Tomb. Amy’s marriage to the publican Keith is similarly trotted out in material terms, as a cheaper class of cushion-cover: ‘It felt like the Edwardian horsehair furniture he had refused her requests to replace after their ...”

“... themselves were pleasurable,’ she adds, ‘but he never convinced me – or I him. I wish Joseph M. Levine were alive to read this book. He would cheerfully disagree with every argument in it.’ This conclusion makes clear that Caroline Levine is not trying to bridge the gap between the two positions. She wants us to see that form is everywhere. This ...”

“... networks of Shakespeare’s day has solved the mystery beyond reasonable doubt. Jo: Taylor was Joseph Taylor, a relatively well documented actor. This is a major discovery, but the appearance of Duncan-Jones’s book did not make the national news. Country Life, however, managed that feat when, as Michael Neill discussed ...”

“... of North Carolina were required to read Approaching the Qur’an: The Early Revelations by Michael Sells, a translation into English of 35 of the early suras with a commentary and explication. Three students – one Jewish, two Christian – and a UNC alumna argued, with the support of a number of fundamentalist Christian organisations, that this ...”

“... and about socialism as the rhetoric of the Labour Party. There was even a hasty attempt to redraw Michael Foot as a moderate, a nice old thing who had had a wild youth, a sheep in wolf’s clothing. This reappraisal, however grotesque, may in part have been motivated by a sudden desire to be analytical and reasonably truthful, after all the intoxicating ...”

“... détente with the United States of America is suddenly a possibility. The aged President Kennedy (Joseph P., not John F.) plans to fly to Berlin for a summit meeting. Since all this is conjecture as to how things might have turned out, it can only be assessed against your own, or other people’s, conjectures. The two best-known novels based on the premise of ...”

“... justify all of Naipaul’s intensities and obsessions. These eight pieces – a long one on the Michael X murders in Trinidad, five on Argentina and Uruguay, one on the Congo and one on Joseph Conrad – are held together by Conradian preoccupations. They represent an ‘effort of thought and sympathy’, an effort that ...”