“... band of Pioneers, who are opening the way for the march of the nation across the continent’. More than three thousand copies of The Pioneers were purchased within hours of its publication on 1 February 1823, establishing Cooper as by far the most successful American novelist of his time. The following year the Atlantic published an imaginary dialogue ...”

“... marble busts on the walls. I noticed Ascherson was taking his time over an inscription to the poet Thomas Campbell, and some words of Campbell’s began to echo somewhere in my head, two lines from The Pleasures of Hope. ‘Tis distance lends enchantment to the view, And robes the mountain in its azure hue. Not good lines, but they seemed good enough as I ...”

“... That is, after all, only to say of writing what is true of any human action: intentions are a lot more complicated and people less self-acquainted than you might think.But Lawrence was referring to something more mysterious than that. He was saying that the tale and its artist are intrinsically opposed to each other, that ...”

“... that the Smith of Mapplethorpe’s photo belongs to the same blithe, peppy era. She seems more real than the crinkly tinfoil stars of the time, but also a thousand times more fantastic. Think of all those 1970s prog rock sleeves and their multicoloured worlds of sauciness and sorcery – then switch to the stark ...”

“... The​ Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus liked to look on the bright side. True, that hasn’t been the usual assessment: his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) was intended to drench the parade of Enlightenment optimism about human possibility. The Radical writer Richard Price reckoned that an expanding population was a good thing, and that it would follow inevitably from more virtuous forms of government ...”

“... 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 ...”