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“... have local solutions, if indeed they were seen as problems at all. This is the point at which Robert Crease’s World in the Balance gets going. He is indebted to Kula, as is every recent historian writing about measurement and modernity, but he takes the story onwards, dealing in more detail with 19th and 20th-century metrology and its engagements ...”

“... It seems that the likes of Edward Larocque Tinker, Robert P. Swierenga and Colonel John S. ‘Rip’ Ford have all made valuable contributions to our knowledge of the cowboy world, and Richard Slatta’s Cowboys of the Americas* sets out to illuminate the structures and processes behind the historical underpinning behind those who wear spurs ...”

“... have to shave? How many times a lifetime? It’s distressing To think of all the pressing a pants-crease and undressing Required to make you look like you know how to behave. Not only does Baudelaire behave, but, in his chalk-stripe suit, carpeted stairs Look up at him like looking at a god or royalty. His rent-stabilised apartment feels a kind of loyalty ...”

“... Quixote with eagle nose and jaw, who had persuaded the burly Yorkshireman as they set out for the crease together not to wear batting gloves, which were unsporting. No gesture was involved, but a certain amount of quiet conviction. John Betjeman and Joan Hunter-Dunn would have approved: indeed Betjeman was a great admirer of Blunden’s poetry. His English ...”

“... laws, and everything’s laws’, as a character says. The chief frolickers in the novel are Oscar Crease, a (one-time) playwright and (casual) history instructor, described in the newspapers as ‘a wealthy recluse living on Long Island’; and his 97-year-old father, the judge giving the instructions to the jury in Virginia. Oscar’s girlfriend Lily thinks ...”

“... Some, it turns out, have a further distance to migrate than others. One of Simpson’s lawyers, Robert Kardashian (you knew it was only a matter of time before the Kardashians came into it), played by David Schwimmer in the TV series, was perfectly certain in life of his friend’s innocence, yet, in TV-land, certainty is just a ...”

“... including an infant son, but there’s no mention of this in her prose: the most the translator Robert Chandler has dug up is a letter from 1946, when she was 74, in which she tells her eldest daughter that had she stayed in the marriage ‘it would have been the end of her.’ This sort of silence on personal things is quite typical: she never mentioned ...”

“... a bay), William Baffin (who became an island) and Vitus Bering (who became a strait). He describes Robert Peary claiming the North Pole for America, and how, to keep up the morale of his men, Richard Collinson erected a billiard table on the sea-ice of Cambridge Bay. The table was fashioned from snow blocks, the cushions from walrus skin stuffed with ...”

“... funds, is where he has settled – between moonlight flits and hinted-at episodes in the tight crease between disenfranchised scholarship and accidental criminality. Refusing to allow the area he inhabits, the banishment, to become a noose, Seabrook has decided to celebrate it with a virtuoso exhibition of sardony. He champions the unloved and the ...”

“... into a solo artist, but enjoys the consolation prize of a little house ‘with its own little crease in the hillside filled with the deep green shade of pines and succulents, bamboo and yucca: the California green that can make you forget the California brown all around it’. Of all the book’s characters, Jo makes the most determined attempt to escape ...”

“... things he wished he could do – ‘a dozen Chekhov-Shakespeare novels’, as one of his editors, Robert Phelps, summarised a characteristic resolution; a life of Jesus; a novel about the atom bomb – were to become an almost public constituent of his writing life. His criticism is marked by the same mixture of yearning and disappointed hopes. Agee’s ...”

“... now. At Stonor once I was helping him change some sheets and had put the bottom sheet on with the crease folding down, not up ... the fact that I find my mistake hard to describe indicates how finicky I found it. Bruce reproved me, explaining that the creases should always go the other way. I thought this pedantic and probably said so but I have always ...”