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“... in its own right. It can still be peered into at the National Gallery (at the moment it is part of Jonathan Miller’s exhibition), which also houses the Fabritius picture. Perhaps it is because they deal so magically with light and space that de Hooch’s pictures make you preternaturally aware of the relationship between flat picture and depicted light and ...”

“... Amerindian and White Negro’. It is all a bit too much, but at least Mellers takes care, unlike Jonathan Cott in his expensive, over-reverential tome: one more coffee-table book. It may seem a bit Dylanesque (i.e. slightly cruel) but I finished Cott’s book without being able to remember what it had been about. Mellers has, at the very least, used his ...”

“... independent judiciary. It was the critical episode in the transformation of Britain from a minor power with a dynastic foreign policy to a major one with an imperial destiny. It laid the foundations of the constitutional practices which would be exported round the world. In Scotland it overthrew the Episcopalian state church and led to the Act of Union. In ...”

“... or was believed to, which sometimes had the same result. Robert Elliott’s classic study of The Power of Satire tells us that poems were used as weapons of war in pre-Islamic Arabia, and it is not only there, or in the curses of primitive tribesmen remote from our literary tradition, that this ‘power’ showed ...”

“... burned alive, for same-sex relationships, while the loving sexual relationship between David and Jonathan in the Old Testament has caused generations of biblical translators to tie themselves in knots trying to conceal the obvious. Christ himself made barely any pronouncements condemning sexuality. This has not stood in the way of Church ...”

“... retire to the basket chair with a hurt expression or the remark ‘Mummy doesn’t want me, Jonathan.’ You will find me harder to dispose of than that, Precious, & J will be old enough by then to know when he’s playing gooseberry & will tactfully retire to the bathroom whilst we try and make up for lost time, holding close to each other & forgetting ...”

“... its reliance on the slightly shallow brilliance of simile as opposed to the deeper, more reflexive power of metaphor. You’re meant to be thrilled by it, but not to linger too long, for it’s leading you into a story, not trying to stop you in your tracks. In that respect, it is very like a lot of the best lines in current verse – lines that dazzle briefly ...”

“... but he seemed to have brought nothing back but Cartesian puritanism and a belief in the saving power of experimental literature (‘J’écris, donc je suis,’ as Camus put it). Sartre had been dazzled by the idea that there are no compelling reasons for living, and seemed to think that ‘life is tragic because it is miserable.’ Quite the ...”

“... Love for Lydia seemed to me unsurpassably fine in their emotional eloquence and the transporting power of their natural descriptions. For a long time, I couldn’t imagine the existence of a greater novelist than Bates.In adolescence, my reading predictably widened in its range, but it hardly deepened. Joyce, Hardy, Dickens, Camus, George ...”

“... that were capable of being explained scientifically. These religious zealots were lazy and power-drunk, he thought, and relied on laziness and credulity in others. What gives the Belfast address its particular interest is its context. In 1864 Pope Pius IX had declared his infallibility and in 1870 the Vatican Council had ratified it, leading among ...”

“... belief that if immigrants get ‘more’ of something (jobs, education, opportunities, political power), natives (or whites) must get less. This guides his discussion of the local economic impact of immigration in Merton, South-West London: ‘Poor whites [are] doing the worst of the lot.’ Such people have ‘mainly opted out: they seldom vote, and a lot ...”

“... warfare; he proceeded through the arrival and departure of the Romans, the rise and fall of feudal power, and the ‘madness’ of the civil wars, before concluding with the ‘glorious revolution’ of 1688. But while he regarded the revolution as ‘a new epoch in the constitution’, he refused to go along with the sanctimonious Whigs who presented it as ...”

“... he was not martyred yet. Kellas couldn’t be sure. It requires something like the magnification power of the Jodrell Bank radio telescope to bring the war into sufficient focus for it to take on a personal dimension – a thought repeated again and again through the book. The reporter’s dislocation from events to which he’s attached only by his ...”

“... determine, the pursuit of political life. It is within this context of political mentalities that Jonathan Hughes situates his study of the Duke of York’s charismatic eldest son, Edward IV. Edward has always received a mixed historiographical press. Contemporaries recognised and celebrated his energy, intelligence and good fortune, but gave due weight as ...”

“... Jonathan Franzen​ has been compared to 19th-century greats: to Tolstoy, to Dickens. In respect of his best and most successful book, The Corrections, the praise carries a false hint of the retrograde, of revival of old forms or subject matter. Published at the turn of the millennium, The Corrections is a work of its time, not for its topical themes of dementia, the medicated society or stock market chicanery but for its approach to family ...”