“... she regarded as frivolous, insisting on balls and parties which exhausted their menfolk and took them away from their work. ‘It is the wives – confound them,’ she wrote. ‘They take no sort of interest in what is going on, know no Arabic and see no Arabs. They create an exclusive (it’s also a very second-rate) English society quite cut off from ...”

“... forbidding sea towards new land’. Perhaps the strangest thing about Duncan’s dream is that it took him so long to think it strange. Though he’d write, as an adult, that the dream-vision of field and cave remained an ‘emblematic and puzzling’ motivator of his poetry, as a child he wasn’t puzzled at all. His adoptive parents, a public-works ...”

“... The 17th-century antiquary John Selden spent his life deciphering Greek inscriptions and interpreting Near Eastern myths. No scholar of his time had more experience with the historical study of material remains; no one knew better how easily a modern intellectual can read too much into an ancient object. As he remarked one day, ‘It was an excellent question of my lady Cotton, when Sir Robert Cotton was magnifying of a shoe, which was Mose’s or Noah’s, and wondering at the strange shape and fashion of it: But Mr Cotton, says she, are you sure it is a shoe?’ The 20th-century art historian Martin Kemp has spent his life reconstructing the techniques with which Italian Renaissance artists analysed and represented the natural world: the science of art, as he once called it ...”

“... one that should be asked only once in the history of literature, then shelved. Sterne pretty well took care of the issue with Tristram Shandy, since when it has become the clunkiest way of expressing the central doubt of human experience. It begins to look like an insult to the intelligence of an audience, who, having, as Potter scoffed in a New Society ...”

“... outside world was awake and the government got its bill, which was always going to happen anyway. John Bercow, Speaker of the Commons since 2009, has proved robust in promoting the rights of Parliament at the expense of the executive, grown overmighty in the last half-century. Up to March this year he had granted a staggering 439 urgent questions, each ...”

“... noting how many literary journals had recently closed and fearing for the future of the Lit Supp, John Middleton Murry, a frequent contributor, declared ‘the decline in the amount and quality of reviewing has been catastrophic since 1914,’ adding that ‘book reviewing is a vanished profession.’ That obituary turned out to be premature, as have been its ...”

“... grandfather Julius. Pa was a music teacher, worshipper of Ruskin, read the Bible to the family. Ma took the children to the village Methodist chapel, something Stanley in the end found unsatisfying. ‘I have listened to a thousand sermons, and would like something to counterbalance this. I would like to read about St Francis and St Thomas Aquinas,’ he wrote ...”

“... to hated courtiers, who would then promptly ruin themselves on its costly maintenance.) Yet John Goode notes in Women Writing that Lawrence is here unwittingly acute about something central to sexist ideology: that ‘woman is an image to be uttered’ – uttered, that is, by other people. One feature of these four books allows them to be discussed ...”

“... less grave than the anachronistic and sentimental idea, entertained by the supposedly tough-minded John Berger in his television series, that Frans Hals intended his late group portraits to expose the true horror of bourgeois society. Civilisation certainly extends our sympathies; it may deepen our understanding of European history; but it avoids challenging ...”

“... or happy. Steedman is concerned to find this thinking at the level of daily life. She shows us John Locke writing to his Somerset friends, the Clarkes, asking advice about servants and ‘weighing up the capacities, abilities and personalities’ of the Clarkes’ maids. In contrast to his thoughts on the toilet training, washing and dressing of ...”

“... East End to high-rise development. High-rise is debated here with attention to its proponents (who took to saying that high-rises, made out to be heaven, were hardly the hell they were to be accused of being) and with a more noticeable attention to those who felt they were hell, that Candleford to high-rise, so to speak, was a wrong direction. There are pages ...”

“... harbours and through torpedo nets. Another spectacular display of effective heroism, noted by John Gooch in Mussolini’s War, was the all-out charge of the Savoia Cavalleria, the Italian equivalent of the Life Guards, when 650 mounted men with sabres and pistols broke a Russian infantry regiment some 2000-strong at Izbushenski on 24 August 1942. Sans ...”

“... for a Cuban visa in Mexico City before the assassination was not Oswald but an impostor. The FBI took over Oswald’s possessions and tried to conceal the fact that he owned hundreds of dollars’ worth of espionage equipment including a Minox ‘spy camera’. Summers’s book is full of this kind of heavily suggestive but not-quite-conclusive ...”

“... should ‘decide when would be the proper time to drop one’. According to Ann and John Tusa, Winston Churchill, then out of office, ‘went on a solitary rampage, growling that the Russians must be told to retreat from Berlin or “we will raze their cities.” ’ Perhaps he had only old-fashioned razing in mind. (Lord Boothby has put it on ...”