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“... in Oxford. Yet at no point does truth appear to have been sacrificed to popularity, and the weight of archival research which has gone into the book is formidable. The list of acknowledgments reminds us of what is becoming an increasingly serious problem: the cost of research is increasing faster than the cost of living, and much faster than the funds ...”

“... his tink tink, tink tinkbespeaking a familiarity with the science of iron-carbon alloysthe Chinese developed alongside the Dao,he’s believed to anticipate the licethat will infest his nest by stitching intoits brush-pile the egg sacs of lice-eating spiders.This ‘time-release packet’ is just one example of what Muldoon describes elsewhere in the collection as ‘future-proofing’ (‘Once we relied on a hoard//of seed that had been sacked/and saved ...”

“... shirts. But the hats themselves seem next to useless: they suffer from the inevitable loss in weight of something reduced to the symbolic. They might just as well be found on a music-business hipster in dirty clothes shuffling into a blues bar; or on a businessman from Chicago stepping out of his air-conditioned lobby. Austin is capable of disappointing ...”

“... cut into rock with its mind on the sea, he must have found his twin interests in lightness and weight, and a sense that the world was only just over the horizon. He also found an interest in the properties of materials: his father was a builder. It is hard structural science that enables a roof canopy – ten thousand square metres of ferrocement, just ten ...”

“... or rather, Leland Stanford Junior University, as it is still officially called. As the historian Richard White puts it in his lively account of the institution’s origins, ‘without the dead child – Leland Stanford Junior – the Stanford campus would be just another patch in the suburbs sweeping south from San Francisco.’Leland Stanford Jr, born in ...”

“... very problematically in love with his best friend’s wife. I knew little about his artist son, Richard – C.R.W. Nevinson – apart from his First World War paintings and prints. They are easy to like: influenced by Cubism but totally comprehensible – a sort of Modernism-lite. I went to the Nevinson retrospective at the Imperial War Museum hoping for ...”

“... she still manages to give a disinterested commentary. Most judgments are benign, or neutral: Richard Long’s and Hamish Fulton’s documented walks tap ‘a narrow, poetic vein’; Gilbert and George ‘have succeeded in charging their surroundings with positive unease: offset by their passivity everything becomes art’; Barry Flanagan’s hares had ...”

“... he describes the gap between himself and the other students as a ‘nameless difference like a weight’: The others were a race of gods!     Over the gap of our disjunction I scanned their features, mouth and eyes, Wondering if there could lie the prize;     But had no foothold, root or function.Despite the diffidence and shyness so frequently ...”

“... Negotiating the commercial treaty of 1860 with France, Richard Cobden, he later revealed, felt ‘humiliated’ by the contrast between the rational system of measurement in force across the Channel and the weird complication of its British counterpart. Metrication and decimalisation would not only smooth the conquering path of British commerce but contribute to the harmony of nations ...”

“... he gestures towards is conducted in full awareness of those successes, and concerns precisely what weight or significance to attach to them. In short, Flanagan never explains what he means when he says that ‘the mind is the brain.’ But then we have no way of judging whether the brain sciences do regard this claim as a constitutive principle, no way of ...”

“... family, as in: ‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’ (Richard Pevear/Larissa Volokhonsky). The implied proposition is that happy families are not much use to a novelist, and the next sentence confirms this view. ‘All was confusion in the Oblonskys’ house.’ Very promising. Throughout his life Vladimir Nabokov ...”

“... of text and almost another hundred pages of notes, it does not reach the point around 1700 when Richard Bentley reshaped the Press into a major player, as he tried to reshape Horace, Paradise Lost and Trinity College, where McKitterick is fellow and librarian. In the 1710s the appearance of Bentley’s Horace and Newton’s Principia on CUP’s list gave it ...”

“... meditative, fundamental critique of French Revolutionary ideals and practices. Professor Richard Lebrun’s monograph on Joseph de Maistre is, at many points, a pioneering effort. Burke’s indictment, with its complexly diverse legacy in Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities, in Carlyle, in Yeats, and in Orwell’s riposte (both to Dickens and Burke), is ...”

“... when others are trying to prevent them from realising them’. The pursuit of power was not, as Richard Evans seems to suggest in his introduction, a distinctive feature of 19th-century Europe. What changes over time is not the fact that people seek power, but the means by which they do it, as well as the nature of the contest with those who resist them. In ...”

“... 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 ...”