“... Rococco artist who seems to be Mr Harris’s invention – and the subject of an earlier book – Thomas Robbins the Elder. By the end of the 18th century topography is firmly part of English landscape painting in the work of Richard Wilson, Gainsborough, Constable and Turner, all of whom are represented. The value of this book to architectural historians is ...”

“... American languages; Byron’s ‘Imitation of Macpherson’s Ossian’; Goethe’s Werther; and Thomas Jefferson, who said that Ossian was better than Homer. It was also Ossian by way of Matthew Arnold who structured the Celtic Twilight in-Ireland and Scotland. Despite all this Macphcrson’s texts have been ignored for much of this century, partly because ...”

“... history of eschatology, life after death and the spiritual path explained by a Tibetan guru. Three more are in the New Age style or promoting New Age ideology. There are also essays by Proust and Timothy Leary and some Freudian texts. Between them, these dominate the list and are the most visible volumes of non-fiction in the windows of every ...”

“... conscious of the anachronistic nature of a siege. ‘Medieval?’ the sick Steevens asks. It’s more ancient than that. Sieges are out of date. In the days of Troy to be besieged was the natural lot of man: to give ten years at a stretch to it, why, it was all in a life’s work: then there was nothing else to do ... But to the man of 1899, with five ...”

“... the move was also encouraged by those Met patrons who collect new art and, although the museum has more than six million visitors a year, the prospect of an expanded audience was a prompt too. In addition, the deal gives the museum time to develop new spaces for modern and contemporary art back on Fifth Avenue, which are to be designed by David Chipperfield on ...”

“... it is proper to conclude that Holbein had borrowed them from Kratzer for his new painting; or, more exactly, since it does not seem that Holbein painted all the segments of this picture at the same time, that he has had them put on a carpeted tabletop, along with his job-lot of examples of earthly skills – music, arithmetic, geography – on the bottom ...”

“... After a decade or more dominated by special studies of anonymous or bestselling authors now suitable for academic recovery, Philip Fisher’s Still the New World marks a return in some ways to an older and less suspicious idea of ‘classic American literature’. Fisher is a critic who has written extensively on realist prose and painting, and his new book is a commentary on Emerson, Whitman, Melville, James and Twain, among others, with significant asides on Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer ...”

“... a small proportion of colleges and universities in the US: generally, those which attract many more applicants than they have available places. Most schools are happy to accept anyone who can meet minimal entrance requirements and pay tuition. The most prestigious private and public institutions, though, are crucibles of competition. In last year’s round ...”

“... the novelist asks a friend to come to Tunbridge Wells, where she will be able to see a figure more ‘grotesque’ even than Beau Nash or Colley Cibber, ‘a sly sinner, creeping along the very edges of the walks, getting behind benches ... afraid of being seen ... Come and see this odd figure!’ – who is of course Richardson himself. Rawson’s ...”

“... firmly fixed on the readers of the magazines he wrote for, in a way that had never bothered the more obsessed and manic genius of Kipling. And so London’s strong men say to their girlfriends, or rather they ‘passionately cry’: ‘Even unto death I shall claim you, and no mortal man shall come between.’ And a handsome fellow he was as he waded among ...”

“... had not been expected to become prime minister) were of priceless reassurance, probably all the more because they were heard and not seen. They created the warmth which the anxious Ministry craved. Freedman goes on to subdivide her subject ‘Four wartime needs predominate in verbal manoeuvres’: the need for silence, the need for humour, the need for ...”

“... in Kreuzberg. He had no children, or none he knew about; had never slept with the same girl more than five times; had written nothing; had no money; no family, now; was replaceable.’ The book begins when Friedrich is catching a ride back from Cologne to Berlin with two strangers: a pretty girl who has named herself, improbably, Daphne; and the ...”

“... that they would have liked to hear what it was like to carry a standard in battle, or to know more about the Spanish lady to whom he gave a lift under fire, or about the wounded soldier he decided to carry on his ‘private mules’ rather than leave him dying at the roadside with the others: but on these matters Aitchison keeps a tight lip, just as he ...”

“... seen many hotels recently: the rich, crowded period hotel in Death in Venice which that film loved more than it loved Venice, Tadzio or death; or the banner-streaming, nostalgically remembered hotel in Fellini’s Amarcord; or J.G. Farrell’s hero committed to reviving the antiquated Hotel Majestic in Troubles; or, most notably now, The White Hotel of ...”

“... great exploitation of coal when industry elsewhere was failing to expand. Such families brought more than their labour to Wales: they brought their language, and they, the urbanised Welsh, and the Education Act of 1870, jointly account for the development of a monoglot English-speaking population. This population was a minority, though only just, of the ...”