“... Enlightenment as an intellectual event for progressive people. It is, in a gentlemanly way, one more goodbye to (Isaiah) Berlin. Can Romanticism be similarly‘discovered’? Certain inquiries – pursued in this journal, among other places – suggest affirmative answers. Two notable studies have appeared recently: Marilyn Butler’s Romantics, Rebels and ...”

“... James Sadler, the balloonists; in King George III, who loved telescopes and music and balloons; in Thomas Beddoes, the doctor, and his Pneumatic Institute, and his wife, Anna; in Michael Faraday, the physicist; in Charles Babbage, the mathematician and inventor of the difference engine; in Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats and Byron; in Mary ...”

“... had been authorised by Parliament in 1691. When that proved insufficient, several million more were conjured up by means of government bonds, and the creation of the Royal Bank of England in 1694 allowed the debt to grow even further, though William still had to plead with the bankers of Brussels to lend him cash to pay his restive troops at ...”

“... function. The reader senses Peter’s bafflement at the array of names and faces, but is far more baffled himself, seeing on the printed page only names and no faces. Whatever comment was ventured (‘Fort Alane’) is lost on both Peter and the reader. Very neatly, Gabriel Josipovici is introducing us not so much to his characters as to the method of ...”

“... the vast ocean of material bequeathed by those prolific generations. The historian could do no more than row across it, sink a bucket, and retrieve a few random and suggestive samples. Strachey was a solitary explorer, writing in 1918 for a war-weary public that could tolerate Victoriana only in small, savoury doses. He could not foresee the Victorian ...”

“... time as editor, he turned out copy to order, gave the paper a new and daring editorial direction (more news, more sensation), drove up circulation at the expense of the Kendal Chronicle and delivered a profit. De Quincey’s hesitancy in launching himself as a writer is puzzling. It was as though the glamour he had vested ...”

“... her origins in four novels, each a differently disguised autobiography and family history, and one more straightforward memoir. To read these books is to enter a strange space of lenticular shimmer, partly because of all the glamour: Berlin, Rome, Paris, New York, where Bedford sat out war in Europe in the 1940s, and especially Sanary-sur-Mer, on the ...”

“... this volume lacks any obvious raison d’être, it is because this heterogeneity is made all the more conspicuous by their appearing between the same hard covers. In fairness to Elinor Shaffer, the editor, it should be said that she has tried to give some idea of all that ‘comparative literature’ today embraces. So, too, has Paula Clifford in her ...”

“... Minimalism and the many lesser eddies all conscientiously described by Harold Osborne) is no more useful as a term than Romanticism or Classicism have been in helping us to understand the art of the past. John Russell, meantime, in his new book, Meanings of Modern Art, is a little bolder. He begins conventionally enough with Manet and the ...”

“... made news as well as money. No one asked A.J.P. Who? Such tensions are worth exploring; and the more A.J.P. Taylor’s life is explored, the more tensions are disclosed. When he wrote his autobiography, he proposed to call it ‘An Uninteresting Story’, doubtless suspecting that his publishers would veto this proposal ...”

“... superiority that commands prestige, and abilities of which society cannot sanely deprive itself.Thomas Piketty quotes Boutmy’s proposition in Capital in the 21st Century (2013), the bestseller that made him a household name among today’s intellectual and business elite. According to Piketty – and it is hard to disagree – this ‘incredible ...”

“... ages is, he suggests, a gross oversimplification, and in its place he seeks to provide a richer, more nuanced analysis, albeit one drawn almost exclusively from printed sources and from such secondary accounts of limited portions of this territory as we already possess. On the whole he succeeds admirably, and the vigour of his prose, his skills at synthesis ...”

“... become well known too, and perhaps it has lodged in people’s memories because it is something more than merely droll: it is rather sad. Under what circumstances might a wedding cake be left out in the rain? Something farcical but catastrophic must have happened, the marquee collapsing or the bride absconding – just the sort of ominous, unexplained ...”

“... summer), but its founder remains an elusive figure: the Bond villain of the modern Scottish scene. More than a garden, Little Sparta was intended as a martial state – Finlay designed stamps for it, and a flag – and with a machine gun emblazoned on its entrance it did not seem overly keen to welcome visitors. When a Strathclyde Regional Council sheriff ...”

“... these islands, but which sometimes exerted an influence on British diplomacy and high culture. Far more complicating – because it went on for much longer and all social levels were ultimately involved – was the impact of runaway formal and informal empire. By the 1820s, a fifth or more of the world’s population, in ...”