“... is that it is definitely “middle-class”. But all schools here are that.’ Beatrice Webb, who may have had some interest in defining the area in which humility was appropriate, complained that her ‘absence of humility ... narrowed her influence to those whom she happened to like and who happened to like her’. She had a point: there was something of ...”

“... and ice’. The Establishment, he says, was ‘determined that, come what may, the Duke of Windsor should never return to live in England, or ever recover any work, influence or honour’. Bloch selects the evidence to support his view. The Windsors’ wedding, he notes, was ‘boycotted’ by the Palace: the only present from the King ...”

“... with artistic works the features of beauty and unexpectedness – qualities which general readers may have been enabled by Hardy’s Mathematician’s Apology to perceive in this simple but profound theorem: a prime number that leaves the remainder I when divided by 4 can be expressed as the sum of two squares in one and only one way. Mathematical ...”

“... literary-theoretical criticism in that he has no choice but to express himself in words; and, we may add, to learn about the past in words – through language, rhetoric, texts? Lord Acton wrote that our studies should have the chastity of mathematics. But that can never be, and I, for one, should not desire it. Elton says that historical evidence is that ...”

“... or (as the editors of Modernity and Identity prefer) ‘low-modernity’. However reluctant one may be to see it go, modernity appears to be slipping away, and the need to discover its identity seems correspondingly urgent. If, for the sake of clarity, we take the modern era to include at least the period from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th ...”

“... original (moreover, I suspect that, in addition to wax and wood, textile was employed). The gold may explain the survival: it transformed a painter’s model into a work of miniature sculpture attractive to the collector. After his return to Florence in 1510 Sansovino was commissioned to carve a half life-size marble Bacchus for a garden. He created the ...”

“... To worry in this way, you need to take seriously the question whether our descriptions of Reality may not be all too human, all too influenced by our hopes and fears. It helps to anguish about whether Reality (and therefore Truth as well) may not stand aloof, beyond the reach of the sentences in which we formulate our ...”

“... was at art college. At the end of that year, Lily took a job with William Morris’s daughter, May, who taught her to embroider the complicated Morris patterns and to transfer designs to fabric. She was friendly with May, and often ate with the family, but she was not encouraged to make her own designs, and quickly found ...”

“... Lipovetsky’s book is the complete absence of illustrations, even diagrams and graphs. This may be the first book about fashion without pictures – even Roland Barthes used diagrams. Of course, Balzac’s ‘Physiologie de la toilette’ didn’t have any, but that originally appeared in a magazine, and journal publication can preclude pictures even ...”

“... family, Denis Mack Smith has turned back to a figure who fully engages his sympathies, and some may miss the darkly satirical tone of those earlier essays in denunciation. Mazzini is a work of passionate advocacy, which aims both to remind us of its subject’s enormous importance on the European as well as the Italian stage, and to convince us that on the ...”

“... under the age of 50, the odds are that you’re not, and if you’re under the age of 30, you may well be bloody furious. Britain has become a polity plagued by a fear of its own rejuvenation. How has this situation come about? It’s tempting to view the division in wholly ‘cultural’ terms – a clash of values. This story is well ...”

“... for not giving any – as well as being admirably genial. After all, says Aldiss, the definition may be wrong, but it doesn’t matter: ‘we can modify it as we go along.’ The definition is as follows: ‘Science fiction is the search for a definition of mankind and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of ...”

“... euphemism, found in the Spectator, this time referring to the former Kate Middleton: ‘She may still have her V-plates intact … the age-old requisite for future queen consorts.’ The equation of young women and toilets is gross and the far side of misogyny but it’s only to be expected in a tampophiliac family with a fondness for ...”

“... despite his mother’s clamorous love for him, sounds like he was an orphan in his own family – may be a reason for having these kinds of thought, but that only makes them more pertinent. How, White asks, could one be proud of one’s disloyalty? And the answer might be, one could be proud of it if it was part of one’s project to find the impersonal ...”

“... funding and operations of Arab-based terrorist groups. As for Europe, British military support may be unconditional, but most European countries – Russia among them – are likely to restrict their help to intelligence and policing. Apart from the fact that most European armies are useless when it comes to serious warfare, they are already showing great ...”