“... in The Great Gatsby, of needing to fulfil a personal myth and become the man he had dreamed of. Lord Jim and Gatsby are doomed by the plot they invent for themselves: Crane’s own tale was ironically haunted by just the kind of démarche or incongruous detail he was good at describing. The debonair poker-playing war reporter was in fact a mother’s ...”

“... and in England Doris Lessing also seems to have gone galactic, or at least inter-planetary. The Home Office, for its part, still promises survival for the homely. In view of all this, one is tempted to proscribe any further dealings with one’s apocalyptic self, for fear of giving comfort to the enemy. But it won’t do: that self is in all of us, for good ...”

“... political lineage of Europe, that of ‘Dr Johnson, Pitt the Younger, Burke, Benjamin Disraeli and Lord Salisbury’. Some other recent world-histories have taken a stand against Euro-centrism, notably William McNeill’s A World History (1971) and J.M. Roberts’s The Hutchinson History of the World (1976). In this regard, Mr Thomas is a self-conscious ...”

“... editor appears and fortunately Professor Kimball does not qualify. He is not absolutely at home in British affairs and has managed to introduce a few minor errors on this front. He refers to the ‘Lloyd George Liberal Government of World War One’, refuses to admit Sir Stafford Cripps to the War Cabinet in 1942, and thinks that Balaam was ‘a name ...”

“... to milk Shapiro dry. After a particularly ugly late-night scene with Liza and Micki, Shapiro runs home to Celia – whom he finds, like a character in some old farce, at the back door hastily bidding goodbye to her own illicit lover. Shapiro packs his bags and liquidates his assets; he makes his way to Israel, where he divorces Celia, marries a good ...”

“... poetry which Protestantism inhibited. But he also mocks Christian sado-masochism: the crucified Lord wears a ‘wreath of rakish thorn’. Religion emerges from the sequence as a supreme fiction rather than as something unequivocally affirmed. The Arnoldian claim that literature may take the place of religion becomes anything but consoling if the Christian ...”

“... Nintendos and Kindles are assembled – as ‘Mordor’. Why the evil kingdom in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings? ‘At its peak,’ Lindsay writes, ‘some 320,000 workers toiled on its assembly lines and slept in its dormitories.’ A rash of suicides among its workers is part of the reason for Foxconn’s relocation to the still poorer and more ...”

“... use of people’s growing interest in the history of everyday life, from Viking longships to the Home Front during the Second World War. What’s taught at more advanced levels is narrower and more problematical. Yet here it reflects not just the choices made by teachers and schools, but also the preferences of students themselves, who from the age of 14 ...”

“... those who, as the New Statesman soon put it, pictured Brooke as a ‘blend of General Gordon and Lord Tennyson’. To the disgust of Brooke’s Cambridge and Bloomsbury acquaintances, he promoted him as a clean-cut poet-patriot long after the sell-by date for enthusiastic lines about soldiers pouring out ‘the red/Sweet wine of youth’. Mary ...”

“... papyst.’ Nonetheless, it was Bonner who put Wyatt in the Tower for a second time. Wyatt returned home in time to meet the spring of 1540. His homecoming was cause for joy, and the French ambassador reported that no lord in the whole kingdom enjoyed the king’s grace more than did Sir Thomas Wyatt. But circa Regna ...”

“... Prize (1991), came from a similar argument made by Winston Churchill in 1911, when he was First Lord of the Admiralty. The best way to prepare for war with Germany, Churchill believed, would be to upgrade the Royal Navy so that it used oil as fuel rather than coal. It would be risky, in large part because ‘the oil supplies of the world were in the hands ...”

“... gives himself away with a thousand lies and tricks.’ In England his reputation was summed up by Lord Vansittart of the Foreign Office, who declined to send official condolences on the news of his death because he was a ‘first-class cad’. Hemingway, yet more succinctly, described him as a ‘jerk’. Despite all this it can often seem that d’Annunzio ...”

“... while employed as tutor to Louis XIV’s heir. Interest in world history is nothing new. When Lord Acton planned the volumes of the Cambridge Modern History in the 1890s, he took for granted both the need for ‘transcending nationality’, and that world history signified something more than ‘the combined history of all countries’. As to ‘global ...”

“... takes place in Lombardy: Griselda’s husband, Walter, is modelled in part on Bernabò Visconti, lord of Milan. Her story is more than a narrative about gender or a religious allegory; it is an object lesson in tyranny. Some tales are set even further afield: ‘The Squire’s Tale’ at the court of Genghis Khan; ‘The Man of Law’s Tale’ takes its ...”

“... strange not to have to press my way to such treasures through a great crowd of people. And it came home to me that there was once a time, not too long ago, when painting of this kind – The Dead Christ Supported by Four Angels from Rimini, the classic dialogue between Bellini and Mantegna’s versions of The Agony in the Garden, the grisaille Lamentation sent ...”