“... of Andrew Marvell. Other republican writers were being dusted off and refurbished, to be published more or less surreptitiously. Paradise Lost, published without acclaim in 1667, was reprinted in 1674, and again in 1678. According to Dr Johnson, ‘It forced its way without assistance; its admirers did not dare to publish their opinion … till the Revolution ...”

“... it made the front page of some British newspapers. But the case was soon forgotten, unlike the more lurid pieces of white mischief which went on in the so-called Happy Valley. Yet the Selwyn affair mattered more, and like George Orwell’s Burmese Days (published in the same year), it encapsulated almost all the stresses ...”

“... sources into the narratology of modern angst. But his effort to see the diary as something more than ‘full, objective reporting’, a bigger literary deal than just ‘a concomitant of Pepys’s delight in book-keeping’, points in the right direction. The work somehow retains its currency as ‘one of the great classics of literature’ (to stick ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”