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“... of other sporting volumes. They were all successful at home, but this translation of the Notes by Thomas Hodge is the first into English. We can see on every page why Aksakov’s contemporaries took his book to heart. Turgenev, for instance, said: ‘This is real Russian speech: general and direct, supple and deft. There is nothing strained and nothing ...”

“... never rose above the level of the hunting party or war band. More recently, scholars such as Thomas Kavanagh and Hämäläinen have found considerable evidence of a sophisticated if highly decentralised politics. Unlike the rigid hierarchies familiar to Europeans, Comanche political organisations were fluid and consensual, alliances of local groups based ...”

“... regional press over a period of just four years.Court reporting has a long tradition in Britain. Thomas Grant, in his book about the Old Bailey, Court Number One (John Murray, £10.99), gives special credit to Rebecca West, who wrote about treason and spy cases from the 1940s to the 1960s, and Sybille Bedford, whose account of the trial of Dr Bodkin Adams in ...”

“... Rossetti or another. I can’t believe that he chose to deliver these Clarendon Lectures as a hodge-podge. It is more probable that he observed the impressionism that Beckett ascribed to Proust: ‘By his impressionism I mean his non-logical statement of phenomena in the order and exactitude of their perception, before they have been distorted into ...”

“... Published two hundred years ago this year, An Essay on the Principle of Population made the Rev. Thomas Robert malthus into the man of the moment. Malthus’s principle – that population inevitably outruns food resources – was heralded by some as the decisive scientific refutation of the mad perfectibilist schemes of the French Revolutionaries and their English confrères like William Godwin, and damned by others as hardheartedness incarnate ...”

“... a need for hope in Americans and in others, and much of that hope died with him. There is, as D.M. Thomas’s novel suggests, continuing disbelief – it can’t have happened, it is a bad dream or a mere movie, reality will pick up and go on again. There is the mythological investment in the Kennedys as a doomed dynasty, a notion which also appears in ...”

“... villainy. 16 March. To St Etheldreda’s, Ely Place for the funeral of Anna Haycraft (aka Alice Thomas Ellis) who died a week or so ago in Wales and whose body had therefore to be brought down for the funeral and then presumably taken back to Wales to be buried beside Colin, her late husband, at their Welsh farmhouse. This, I gather, is pretty remote and ...”

“... cells, her body, her life: On closed eyes I see the spartan wall of the ICU covered in a scrambled hodge-podge of sticky notes, crossing one another at all angles, illegibly written over, snippets of reference, madly irrelevant.But the poem (called ‘Own’) continues: Symbolism as the party face of paranoia. Chorus of expert voices beyond my door, forever ...”

“... Sir Greg Martin, executive head of Durand Academy in Stockwell, south London. As Margaret Hodge noted in a spectacular Public Accounts Committee session in January, Martin was until recently running a dating agency from the school premises, advertised on Twitter by @saffrone5, who, Hodge said, ‘was semi-nude with ...”

“... through the mill. Michael Millgate calls his new edition of the biography ‘The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy by Thomas Hardy’. Since he has stripped it of the thin marital disguise of his wife’s name and cleared it of Florence’s editorial emendations carried out after Hardy’s death, he feels able to present it as ...”

“... cruelty and by the desire to redress, must falter finally with Willie, and must falter with Thomas Havens.Havens is one of the host whose speech makes up the patterns of Lincoln in the Bardo. They are motley, their vernaculars range from low to high, from timid to enraged to [redacted], in the case of poor abused Litzie. The difference is the great ...”

“... and I do.’ Graves’s second marriage (in 1950) was to the unassuming Beryl Hodge, characterised in ‘Ruby and Amethyst’ as ‘good as bread/Resistant to all weathers’. This poem compares her rather unfavourably to a White Goddess-style woman (‘rare as myrrh/Her weather still her own’), yet in many ways Beryl proved, for a short ...”

“... in A Christmas Garland: ‘In the heart of insular Cosmos, remote by some scores of leagues of Hodge-trod arable or pastoral … ’ The pathos Meredith barely allows himself to acknowledge in The Egoist is Willoughby’s terrible emotional neediness. During a conversation early in their unsatisfactory courtship, Clara falls silent, ‘knowing’, Meredith ...”

“... John and the vast majority of the other men and boys around at the time were Joseph, James, Thomas or William. Around 1850, however, the repertoire of names in regular use began to increase rapidly. As Gothic-looking steeples rose around the country, so medieval-sounding names crowded around the font: Arthur, Walter, Harold and Neville, Ethel, Edith and ...”

“... characters appeared on the stage.’ Moorcroft Wilson – who has written biographies of Edward Thomas, Isaac Rosenberg and Sassoon – has a carefully forensic style, and tends to rely on remarks by Graves’s contemporaries to convey his character. She has such a store of these that one does get from the book a sense of what a fusion of confusions he ...”