“... very often) he emerges as a crusted reactionary, a Thatcherite to beat all Thatcherites. He loves Nicholas Ridley and the Poll Tax, favours identity cards for football supporters, detests trade unions which behave like trade unions and not as satraps of the employers. He constantly rants against ‘NHS officials, teachers and all who would dip their hands ...”

“... to behave or what to believe. New Puritanism is not a religion, then, but it might, according to Nicholas Blincoe, be ‘the beginning of a new wave’ and present its adherents with ‘a chance to blow the dinosaurs out of the water’. This tongue-in-cheekiness, which from time to time comes across as a swaggering disrespect for all other contemporary ...”

“... whose oeuvre includes a series of envelope writings, or as he called them, ‘pomenvylopes’. Nicholas Moore (1918-86) was one of the most conspicuous stars of the London poetry scene of the 1940s, during which decade he published seven collections and two pamphlets. For a variety of reasons, however, he gave up writing at the start of the 1950s: he ...”

“... fashionable church of Sta Maria della Pace, for example, problems which Pietro da Cortona did his best to solve in his plan for the reconstruction of the church and its piazza. The colonnades of Piazza San Pietro which Alexander commissioned from Bernini were intended to provide shelter from sun and rain alike. Practical considerations ...”

“... mark is deemed to come with Shelley’s drowning and beach cremation in 1822. Hunt died in 1859. Nicholas Roe’s book is not the place to go for news of the Victorian Leigh Hunt and his relations with the young Tennyson, the Brownings, Dickens, Macaulay, Carlyle; but it welcomes inquiries after the friend of Byron and Shelley and Keats, and the ...”

“... alcun concetto C’ un marmo sole in se non circonscriva Col suo superchio ... (‘Not even the best of artists has any conception / That a single marble block does not contain / Within its excess ...’) There is also a madrigal (No 153) written for Vittoria Colonna which is not about the carving of marble but about the casting of metal: It’s not only ...”

“... very likely to change. But there are two others whose claims for inclusion are regularly pressed: Nicholas Malebranche (b. 1638), to be inserted between Leibniz and Locke; and Thomas Reid (1710-96), best inserted between Hume and Kant rather than between Berkeley and Hume, on the grounds that his major works are a response ...”

“... is a terrific reader who can open up Dickens like a plate of gleaming oysters, setting out the best passages about handwriting from Nicholas Nickleby to Great Expectations. He notes the erotic seethings that illegible handwriting occasions in Proust, and his disdain for a decipherable hand in the novel and the ...”

“... 1970s, Lord Snowdon used the space to make motors for Chairmobiles wheelchairs. In the late 1980s, Nicholas Serota, then the director of the Whitechapel Gallery, heard that the site was up for sale and advised him to buy it. The studio was finished in 1991 at a cost of nearly £300,000.These transformations from livestock to light industry to artist’s studio ...”

“... pages before it faded. The exorbitance of his style suited comedy better than pathos. At his best – where his work springs up out of the confluence of grammar and gaiety, of logic and facetiousness, of structure and silliness – he can be one of the funniest writers in the language. When he’s on a roll, his riffs approach the written equivalent of ...”

“... was unheard of. His first recording with Columbia – Bach’s Goldberg Variations – was the best-selling classical record of 1956 and remained in the catalogue for over twenty-five years. This record established Gould as an international star, and in the public mind it forged a link between Glenn Gould and the Goldberg Variations which remains strong ...”

“... the Ulster Rebellion of 1641 clarify English crises at the expense of their local significance. As Nicholas Canny implies in the collection about Thomas Wentworth, Anglocentrism is particularly insidious when talk of interaction across the archipelago is used to obscure English expansionism. These books show how different the results can be when Early Modern ...”

“... and fast. Part of the trouble with these scenes may be that Mulisch just doesn’t write the very best dialogue, but I think the real problem is inherent in the novel’s structure and the very powerful message which that structure is designed to put across. The interests of fiction have deferred here to the purposes of poetry. The episodes which fill up the ...”

“... but Caravaggio’s paintings deserve to be protected from them. Take his Fortune Teller (the best version, of about 1598, is in the Louvre), in which a smiling gypsy girl looks into the face of a young fop as she fingers his palm, detaining his eye and stopping his heart, or at least exciting his vanity, so that he doesn’t notice she is also removing ...”

“... Chapel, entering the Stadtkonvikt, Vienna’s elite boys’ boarding school, where he received the best musical and general education the city had to offer and where his composition teacher was Antonio Salieri, then in his sixties, the grand old man of Viennese music, who had briefly taught Beethoven and would teach Liszt. At sixteen, returning home at the end ...”