“... The struggle against racism is neither the subject nor the underlying theme of his work, any more than it is in the paintings of Alma Thomas, Norman Lewis, Jack Whitten, Ed Clark or Frank Bowling.Jackson belongs in the company of these black modernists, who are only now being recognised by museums that have long ...”

“... had heard of Durand, or, indeed, of the two ‘kindred spirits’ – the British-born painter Thomas Cole and the Romantic poet and newspaper editor William Cullen Bryant – whom he depicted contemplating a lushly idealised Catskills landscape of bluffs and waterfalls, their names inscribed like those of lovers on a nearby birch tree. Cole and Durand are ...”

“... present job, for there is a strong school of thought that any form of institutional history is no more than corporate self-aggrandisement. Of course, in many cases it is. We have all seen the glossy volumes dreamed up by the public relations (or, as they tend to be known nowadays, ‘corporate affairs’) people. Lots of pictures and a text which hypes the ...”

“... how to do it in ways that evoke the heart of the experience and don’t resort unduly to its more freakish terrors? The wonder of Joe Simpson’s escape back into life is both that he survived near death on the Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes and that he has the power of recall to do justice in vivid and original phrasing to an episode which will ...”

“... most modern Reardons, these rending scenes will instantly evoke images of Chancery Lane – or, more precisely, that small alley off the Lane where generations of book reviewers and literary men have known the confused pleasure of securing the price of their next drink(s) in exchange for a mint copy of Giles Goatboy, or of swopping some multi-volume reissue ...”

“... 1850 or 1860 when the ancient universities conspicuously joined the modern world. The trends are more to our liking, or at least we understand them better. The steep climb in matriculations, the diversification of the curriculum, the creation of professional schools, the spread of extra-mural education, the establishment of women’s colleges and the ...”

“... pictures which made his reputation. If a little embroidery made the meaning of a story clearer, or more amusing, Capa would sometimes embroider. Richard Whelan, reasonably enough, is not interested in giving Capa good and bad marks for his conduct, but begs almost all the questions about the morality of photographing sadness, sickness and death when he writes ...”

“... also an individual voice lively enough to resist its seductions. Djuna Barnes doesn’t show any more resistance than her own Felix, who ‘loved that old and documented splendour with something of the love of the lion for its tamer – that sweat-tarnished spangled enigma that, in bringing the beast to heel, had somehow turned towards him a face like his ...”

“... This sad fact has been neglected by biologists, who, being – in general – optimists, are far more interested in how new forms of life appear than in how they depart: a philosophy which, as Raup says, is rather like a demographer concentrating on births and forgetting about deaths. Raup is an obituarist. His book, like all good obituaries, tells us ...”

“... material she’d stashed away from her research on the period, especially about ships. (There is more about ships in The Birthday Boys than one might think.) Morgan is a trainee naval architect; ‘the sublime thermodynamics of the Titanic’s marine engineering’ intoxicate him, and he begins to think ‘that if the fate of man was connected to the order ...”

“... for example, is treated at length. Changes in printing methods meant that books became available more widely than ever before in an increasingly literate society. The establishment – particularly the high-minded clergy – were caught in the awkward position of promoting literacy, but at the same time attempting to guide, if not exactly censor, the texts ...”

“... them from the public’. Despite their many imperfections, the early census counts provided a far more robust statistical picture than was previously possible and, by revealing the scale and pace of population growth, Rickman’s tables confounded contemporary assumptions about the relationship between demography and prosperity. Population was a controversial ...”

“... as a basis for poetic composition. But all Lowell’s poems are about being a Lowell, or rather, more specifically, about being this Lowell. Only in the home of democracy, probably, could the personality of the poet as aristocrat be asserted today in this fashion. It is an irony which strikes deeper with each rereading, and the realisation of it comes each ...”

“... work is what it means, and answering this question requires practice, effort, and the knowledge of more than the book alone. The last point is oddly controversial. Facts about how the books originated are given in new editions, as though they matter. Meanwhile teachers of literature generally insist that reading well means ignoring such redundancies and ...”

“... with that question which has the most general claim to interest: how has it come about that little more than a decade short of its centenary the most fundamental and distinctive claims of psychoanalysis should still be the subject of radical scepticism. That we are entering the shabby world of psychoanalytic apologetic becomes apparent from James Hopkins’s ...”