“... who drive foreign cars, mock patriotism and advocate abortion and homosexuality on the other: so Thomas Frank argues in What’s the Matter with America? The main economic interest of populist conservatism is to get rid of the strong state, which taxes the population in order to finance regulatory interventions, and to introduce an economic programme whose ...”

“... and now again book of the week here, rediscovery of the century there, and indulgently reviewed more or less everywhere; this uniquely dreary and clothy sprog of the electric 1880s; this un-Austrian Austrian and un-Jewish Jew (Joseph Roth – who has certainly spoiled me for Zweig – was both, to the max); not a pacifist much less an activist but a ...”

“... operation going for him in the forest. And I guess the "robin” means he stole birds.’ Robin is more likely to be a nickname for Robert, though the resonance with ‘robber’ may also count for something, and Hood may suggest his frequent disguises, for Robin is a great trickster whose masquerades inevitably bamboozle his foolish oppressors: he specialises ...”

“... polystyrene enclosures occupied every Advent by Father Christmases in the local department stores more sinister than alluring, I came only belatedly to an interest in grottoes. So too, it seems, did Shakespeare, who never used the word ‘grotto’, not even after the arrival of the French hydraulic engineer and garden designer Salomon de Caus at the Jacobean ...”

“... dated to the Grand Siècle, the time of the voyages to Mughal India of François Bernier or Thomas Coryate. Distinctions between the more advanced European cultures in the volume or quality of travellers’ tales would be difficult to make for most of the modern period. In the Enlightenment, for every Cook there was a ...”

“... unstoppable, and the war in Iraq was a brisk investment for the future. The US has many times more tanks, fighter jets, missiles and warships than any other country, but rag-tag armies of insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan still defy its military authority. The American economy, which for years has depended on Asian willingness to finance US deficits, now ...”

“... by the resurgent Marxism and feminism of the 1960s, engaged scholars including T.J. Clark, Thomas Crow, Linda Nochlin and Griselda Pollock asked difficult questions about class, audience, gender and sexuality, questions that were soon rumbling through other fields as well. Yet disruptive though these inquiries were, they mostly continued to insist on ...”

“... Age movement – for it amounts to identifying your self with God. All you need to do is to become more fully conscious of your divinity – to recognise how wonderful, how luminous, you already are. The core of Taylor’s argument is a vigorous and entirely successful criticism of two intertwined bad ideas: that you are wonderful just because you are you, and ...”

“... to be published in honour of the Goethe centenary in 1932. There are improbable moments in D.M. Thomas’s novel, but on the whole it shows tact and respect towards Freud. And The White Hotel isn’t only a case-history. Its heroine, Lisa Erdman, is more than the ‘Anna G.’ of Freud’s paper: she is also a ...”

“... visionary eye, / Soaring reflectively’ which he invokes in ‘The Fortress’ – though once more in the shadow of Platonic ideals realised on the other side of the Channel (‘the further shore’). His Journals of the time record how grand those ambitions were (‘One is impelled by a kind of pretentiousness so incredible that it simply has to be taken ...”

“... in David Thomson’s view, ‘one of the few major English directors’. That this status isn’t more generally acknowledged is partly because Jennings died only five years after the end of the war, at the age of 43, but mostly because, as Kevin Jackson says in this engaging, adulatory biography, he ‘spent most of his professional life not in the glamorous ...”

“... natural, flowing landscape, one which, however artificially engineered, nevertheless looked much more like nature than did the parterres, allées and trimmed hedges of the 17th-century gardens they replaced. Brown was immensely successful. By the 1760s he was earning on average £6000 a year and he went on to stamp his ideal landscapes, including, as Jane ...”

“... tells us that in later centuries, The Twelve Caesars (as Suetonius’ book was often called) did more than any other text to kindle interest in Roman emperors, especially after printed editions began to appear in 1470. Beard’s own Twelve Caesars is a book about the images of those rulers and about the idea of imperial power represented by ...”

“... a testament to ingenuity that it took so long to notice the seemingly obvious fact that legs are more powerful than arms when performing a rotational movement? Even after the invention of the pedal-driven two-wheeler in the mid-1860s, and the discovery that it was better not to pedal and steer the same wheel, the velocipede family was prone to odd ...”

“... as she announces at once she intends to do, Sybille Bedford starts her memoir in 1953, the middle, more or less, of her long life and of ‘our frightful century’ whose history is as much her subject as her own peculiar story. Her opening scene is a summer morning in Geneva, where she passed a few hours between trains, a woman in her early forties, ‘free ...”