“... the Vleeshuis, sitting on fine Spanish leather chairs embossed with the figure of their patron, St John, accompanied by his flock of sheep and oxen; in the evenings, they retired to estates built on acres of quiet pasture just outside the city, with names like De Ribbe (the Rib) or De Ijseren Verckens (the Iron Pigs), Dlammeken (the Little Lamb) or ’t ...”

“... summary of the man, emphasising the significance of the Americas to him, and to his final, major accomplishment. Scientific expeditions proliferated during Humboldt’s lifetime: they aimed at assessing territory for European empires, as well as collecting specimens and artefacts for museums, and theories for savants. Humboldt was a newborn when ...”

“... of there. He thinks that’s very funny, as if I’m under the impression I’ve just shared some major revelation. He used to laugh at me like that in class when I was teaching. There’s a poll in a recent New York Times, buried in the middle of section A, where nearly all of the important news is to be found in the Times, usually below the fold. It ...”

“... that the long poem may be ‘nothing more than a poet’s attempt at greatness, at becoming “major” ’. While, on the one hand, Armitage asserts that ‘today, it is still the short poem that stays in the mind as language, whereas longer poems tend to be remembered for their overall structure or patterning, or for the occasional quote’, his other ...”

“... and others merely succumbed to in ignorance, costs both human and material were being counted by John Maynard Keynes, who agonised about working for a government he despised ‘for ends I think criminal’. The war had, indeed, fast become an increasingly disreputable enterprise which with every discarded corpse raised the stakes of peace. Blinded by the ...”

“... the stately and beautiful wife of the camp commandant. He, the commandant, ‘the Old Boozer’ Major Paul Doll is the second narrator-character, and really the only reason for reading the book: an almost excessively interestingly put-together figure, full of stylistic tics, who blends English and German, business-speak and deadpan, vanity and piffle. Like ...”

“... They were the most real, the closest to the earth, to birth and death, to laughter and weeping.’ John Lossing Buck determined that 79 per cent of the Chinese labour force were farmers, with an average family farm of 2.62 acres. (In the United States, 40 acres had always been seen as the minimum for subsistence farming, as in ‘40 acres and a mule’.) This ...”

“... human cases rarely exceeds a couple of thousand. As the Oxford Textbook of Medicine says: ‘The major animal reservoirs are urban rats as well as rural rodents including ground squirrels and prairie dogs. The Oriental rat flea Xenopsylla cheopis is the most efficient vector. When bitten by a rodent flea humans become an accidental host and play no role in ...”

“... the ethnographic collection was moved into one of the wings to become part of what was now a major exposition of ‘mankind’ in all its glory from the year dot. Jawbones, flints and assorted prehistoric matter were shifted to the new museum from the Jardin des plantes to thicken up this notion of a voyage around the species. The Palais de Chaillot was ...”

“... Coleridge’s​ favourite novelist, John Galt, had a gift for encapsulating disgrace under pressure, and his novels of small-town Scottish life are among the early masterpieces of British political fiction. After a life of robust colonial effort, during which he founded the Canadian city of Guelph, Galt – exhausted and impoverished – came back to Greenock and died there in 1839 ...”

“... echo in Namier’s fascination with the collective and the irrational. Freudianism was another major influence, imbibed by way of Freud’s disciple Theodor Reik, whom Namier met in Vienna in the 1920s. Reik told him that psychoanalysis could cure his insomnia. We shouldn’t overplay the intellectual pedigree of Namier’s ideas, however. When at Balliol ...”

“... he was born in America and knew Africa only at second hand. Both Equiano and Spavens fought in major actions in 1759, Britain’s ‘year of victories’: Equiano as a powder-boy on Edward Boscawen’s flagship the Namur at the Battle of Lagos, and Spavens as a topman on the frigate Vengeance at Quiberon Bay. Equiano later sailed to the Arctic with the ...”

“... in an interview. This doesn’t apply to his paintings of the 1930s, except perhaps to his other major landscape, Larchant of 1939, an exercise in restrained pictorial geometry designed to give eloquence to the church tower set in the middle distance but just breaking through the horizon – the tower of an ancient church, made a symbol of la France ...”

“... children presumed dead and travel to Palestine on a transport designed for orphans (as recorded in Major/Minor, the memoir of Arikha’s daughter Alba). The convoy struck mines in the Black Sea: of the 1500 children who were evacuated, only 130 survived the journey.‘What is modern about him primarily is, if you wish, his anxiety,’ Robert Hughes later said ...”

“... control their own fate: ‘We are out for life and all that life can give us,’ the revolutionary John Maclean said at his trial for sedition in 1918. George Square, 31 January 1919 My grandparents met at a Glasgow ILP branch sometime around the end of the First World War, and I’ve always had a rather romantic view of the party and of that ...”