“... 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 ...”

“... the air of over-interpretation. All these turn up again in Hamlet in Purgatory, but altogether do more to enlighten than to confuse. Perhaps this is because the intellectual shell which enclosed Renaissance Self-Fashioning has dropped away: the faith in progressive authorities from Marx to Lacan and the Fathers of Past and Present; in the middle class as an ...”

“... of the day have been an inordinately long and dangerous journey; for Bloch it was surely no more demanding than the one that had taken him, on numberless youthful occasions, from his family home in the industrial port of Ludwigshafen to the old Palatinate capital of Mannheim on the opposite side of the Rhine. The fairgrounds and circuses and amusement ...”

“... Writer’s block must be thought of as a disease even more specific to a particular occupation than housemaid’s knee or weaver’s bottom. You can have those without being a housemaid or a weaver, but you can’t have writer’s block without being a writer, and a real writer, meaning one who is known at some stage to have written something of substance ...”

“... The first is Eliot’s hypothesis of a 17th-century dissociation of sensibility, here given a more specific formulation in Hobbes’s distinction between locutionary and propositional truth. The second is a Romantic concept of revolution as creative upheaval. The third is a more recent notion of the exhaustion of ...”

“... the other rocky planets of the solar system orbit today, there were once, five billion years ago, more than twenty worlds larger than the Moon, several perhaps as large as Mars. Collisions were common. Rocks brought back from the Moon by the Apollo astronauts tell us that one of these worlds, often known as Theia, hit the still-forming Earth, destroying ...”

“... avoiding everything about it that was not ‘meaning’. Pushkin’s solution was plainer, opener, more sybilline and yet more emphatic. He would take matters to the point at which the reader could take over. Above all, he would have no facile, sentimental or melodramatic endings, no suicides for love or honour, no stock ...”

“... Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, Edmund Burke, Pasquale Paoli, Charles Burney, Thomas Warton and Oliver Goldsmith. Their names appear below the image, cursively engraved, appositely placed: one might almost be looking at a signed group photograph of 18th-century luminaries. In fact the picture is Victorian, painted in about 1845, but the ...”

“... could sweeten their tea with sugar in preference to honey? How many hundreds of thousands more Africans would have had to be heaped onto the scales to weigh more heavily with Pitt than the death of a single European? How many lives of ordinary people would weigh more than the life ...”

“... but as Elizabeth King and David Todd detail, the supposed origin of the machine is supported more by circumstantial evidence than positive proof; it’s an ‘elegant hypothesis’, the authors conclude. More interesting than the clockwork Diego’s uncertain provenance, however, is the tantalising concept of ...”

“... and would like something to counterbalance this. I would like to read about St Francis and St Thomas Aquinas,’ he wrote in his early twenties. He showed an early talent for art, and was sent to the Slade through the benevolence of a local Lady Bountiful. He emerged from it in 1912, an almost dwarfish figure a couple of inches over five feet and weighing ...”