“... of the virtues of The Book History Reader is that it brings such continuities to light, pairing Mark Rose’s densely particularised history of copyright law with Foucault and Barthes on authorship, or Janice Radway’s lovingly detailed reconstruction of the Book-of-the-Month Club’s marketing strategies with Stanley Fish’s aggressively perverse ...”

“... from you? You see what has been achieved, but it is harder to imagine Velázquez making his mark than it is to imagine Ingres touching in one of his smooth cheeks. Velázquez: The Technique of Genius is an illuminating introduction to what can be learnt from the surface of the pictures. (Both authors have written at length about Velázquez in other ...”

“... so now. In Germany, the opinion polls show majorities that are opposed to the replacement of the D-mark while, simultaneously, being resigned to its disappearance. Senior MPs of both Kohl’s Christian Democratic Union and the opposition Social Democrats have told each other not to discuss the Maastricht deficit criteria because they might unsettle a) the ...”

“... a thoroughfare they must have, free and unmolested.’ Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt left its mark on the British political elite. He had made no secret of his ambition to supplant the British in India, and his brief campaign suggested that he might try either of the two obvious routes: via Suez and the Red Sea, or up through Syria, east to the Tigris and ...”

“... and epigraphs are the names and catalogue descriptions of roses. In the novel the isolation of a rose-garden, the luxurious vice of gardening, the reader’s consciousness of literary cultivation taking place amid generic borders, all summon a broad background of traditions and values which are tested against the sharply contemporary commitments to self, job ...”

“... to exchange dreams and memories, above all to argue with him, then we get such superb stories as A Rose for Emily, or Go down Moses, or that splendid saga The Bear (but firmly cutting out the addenda), or that weird, haunting half-fantasy about aboriginal Indians which I do not even pretend to understand called Red Leaves, or we get his three time-outlasting ...”

“... It is a serious mistake, then, to view the Clegg initiative as a one-off. If it succeeds, it will mark the displacement of parliamentary sovereignty by popular sovereignty as the foundational principle of the British constitution. This may, or may not, be a good thing – it all depends on how the emerging system is designed. A suitably structured system can ...”

“... and looking at them, becoming involved with the stories they told. In many cases, the person rose vividly from the programme. The painter Mary Fedden, Catherine’s friend, was ‘celebrated’ at St James’s Church in Piccadilly on 18 October 2012. The event started with ‘The Painter’s Eye’, a talk by Philip Trevelyan, son of Mary’s late ...”

“... highways lay waste, the wayfaring man ceaseth.’ Rural England left nothing like the same mark on posterity as She or King Solomon’s Mines, but he said it cost him more labour than anything else.This wasn’t the first time that arable farmers had fallen victim to abrupt economic and technological change against which they proved powerless, both ...”

“... village of Le Moustier, on the road from Les Eyzies to Montignac, on 11 September 1910, to Alice Rose Champerret and Gaston Yves Champerret. But there was nothing more. David Martin put me in touch with Isabelle Dupois, who had worked as a housemaid at the château where the crate had been found. She told me that Champerret had been living in Paris when the ...”

“... but here it was a spooky hooded figure sitting in front of a laptop, face obscured by a question mark, looking halfway between a hacker and the Grim Reaper.I waited all day for a reply and then, during my son’s bathtime, my phone rang. It was a video call from fake me. I watched the hooded figure glowing on my screen. With sudsy fingers, I answered and ...”

“... French. Perhaps there is a lot to be said in favour of America after all. Does this correspondence mark a moment of significant change in the history of that anti-Americanism so often said to be traditional in France? The Rise and Fall of Anti-Americanism prints the proceedings of a symposium devoted to this question (the original French edition first appeared ...”

“... On 25 January 1788, HMS Supply eased her way between the imposing sandstone cliffs that mark the entrance to Port Jackson and into a waterway that John White, the First Fleet’s surgeon, proclaimed as ‘the finest and most extensive harbour in the universe’. The hyperbole was perhaps understandable, for the Britons were seeing Sydney Harbour through eyes wearied by months at sea, and this was to be their new home ...”

“... to the inner circle of either Bloomsbury generation. Like her fellow painter and sometime lover Mark Gertler she worked ‘on the fringes of the Bloomsbury Group’, as the handout at Dora Carrington: Beyond Bloomsbury puts it. The Pallant House exhibition (until 27 April) and its accompanying catalogue succeed in moving Carrington out of the shade, not ...”

“... the carefree and the caring may not be Utopian, but it’s full of Blair’s millenarian ardour: Mark Rodol, managing director of the Ministry of Sound, calls the phenomenon ‘the biggest collaboration of young people since the Sixties’. ‘Tony Blair’s speech brought tears to my eyes,’ whimpered Noel Gallagher, from the rock-hard Oasis, after ...”