“... Delta has been the most vicious variant so far, with a Spike that allows it to enter cells more efficiently and brush off some antibodies. The strange Spikes of Epsilon, Zeta, Eta etc all passed by without great alarm, none of them able to compete with the Delta variant. There were worries that the next serious variant might be a descendant of ...”

“... none of them original, blend and clash’. No texts could illustrate this idea of literature more neatly than those of Ern Malley, whose complete works were concocted in a single afternoon and evening by two young Australian poets, James McAuley and Harold Stewart, as part of a plot to expose the obscurantism and meaninglessness of what passed for poetry ...”

“... time everything can be turned around, and the front line is pretty close to base camp. A book by Thomas Nagel proves Morgenbesser’s point. There is no better philosophical primer than Nagel’s What does it all mean? A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy (1987). It works with its intended, adolescent audience, but (this is what supports Morgenbesser) it ...”

“... point him out; Each Waiter with an eager eye Observes him as he passes by: That there he is, do, Thomas! Look Who’s wrote such a damn’d clever Book. ‘I wrote not to be fed, but to be famous,’ Sterne later said, famously, in a letter probably designed for future publication. By fame he did not mean immortality, such as Pope might have ...”

“... never been forgotten, other Victorian intellectuals less wise than he, less strong in judgment, more erratic, more colourful and perhaps more imaginative, have enjoyed a fame and a following that he has never quite achieved. This is partly because he sought to be a scholar rather than a ...”

“... and by the intriguing sequence of prints he and others made of paintings of the Peak District by Thomas Smith of Derby, so unlike anything else in the history of landscape art that I have to slap my wrist to stop myself reaching for the word ‘surreal’. It was chiefly through the engravings of these and other printmakers that European landscapes were ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”