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“... In August 1867, Thomas Carlyle published one of his most virulent diatribes against ‘swarmery’, by which he meant the trend towards democracy. The immediate inspiration for ‘Shooting Niagara: and After?’ was the threat of Disraeli’s Reform Act, which would double the number of adult males entitled to vote, and thus, as Carlyle saw it, unleash untold ‘new supplies of blockheadism, gullibility, bribability, [and] amenability to beer and balderdash’: look at America, the beleaguered Sage of Chelsea argued, and its absurd Civil War, prompted by what he derisively called ‘the Nigger Question’: Essentially the Nigger Question was one of the smallest; and in itself did not much concern mankind in the present time of struggles and hurries ...”

“... history of psychiatry over the last twenty or thirty years. The works of Foucault, Erving Goffman, Thomas Szasz and R.D. Laing, and more recently the contributions of Andrew Scull and a new generation of historians, have made it impossible to accept the Whig view of psychiatry’s history. Yet, if these writers have managed ...”

“... the man who has the best claim to have founded our modern idea of the royal family. The reader of Andrew Roberts’s new biography rejoices too. In many ways, the king’s madness is the most interesting thing about a monarch who never included among his delusions the idea that he was anything but a very ordinary person. No other writer, except possibly Alan ...”

“... Kegan Paul, Trench and Trübner. Chatto and Windus began in the 1870s as a partnership between Andrew Chatto who had drive, and W.E. Windus, a minor poet who had some capital. But the firm only took off with the acquisition a few years later of John Hotten’s, Henry Bohn’s and John Maxwell’s publishing properties. Macmillan absorbed the house of ...”

“... a first-rate anthology. There are a number of poems, by Suckling, Henry King, George Farewell, Andrew Young, which will probably be new to the reader, and which will certainly produce ‘the illusion that it was written specially for me’. There are well-known favourites too, like Housman’s ‘Bredon Hill’ and Flecker’s ‘Golden ...”

“... from a mast’, that ‘lineage of joy’.1946 was in fact the year in which Larkin read Thomas Hardy’s ‘Thoughts of Phena’ and experienced a literary conversion, ‘complete and permanent’. Hardy rescued him from Yeats, just as Yeats – three years earlier – had captured him from Auden. Under the Hardy regime, he was indeed able to find ...”

“... on the continent had induced a more temperate climate – a view shared by Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Gibbon read meteorological reports from the colonies and drew a parallel between 18th-century Canada and ancient Germany, where, before the bogs were drained, forests cleared and the soil exposed to the warming effects of the sun, the climate ...”

“... found. This latest work will enhance his reputation as a leading writer with no strings attached. Thomas Keneally’s The Playmaker is actually about the making of Australia and commemorates (the blurbist’s ‘celebrates’ is not the word) the bicentenary of the founding of the English colony in January 1788. It is the kind of subject that would inspire a ...”

“... are read all over the world while Pushkin, despite the efforts of John Fennell, Antony Wood. DM. Thomas and Vladimir Nabokov, remains primarily a writer for readers of Russian. The myriad imperfections of rendering in any translation of a novel do not seriously impede what looks like genuine literary enjoyment: we weep for Anna Karenina and tremble at ...”

“... Tenth also showed up at various times. The First and the Ninth came back at season’s end, while Thomas Hampson sang the complete Mahler songs. Each of the major works, then, was performed at least once, and it wasn’t even an anniversary year. Beethoven’s little things, by contrast, received, by my count, seven performances – by the Philharmonic and by ...”

“... From the 1820s, ‘Jacksonian democracy’ and ‘Jacksonian nationalism’, named after President Andrew Jackson of Tennessee, united the (white) South and West, and some newly arrived immigrants, in hostility to the North-East. A strong strain of ‘producerist’ ideology was linked to a bitter hostility to ‘parasitical’ elements of society ...”

“... art-world figure I knew in New York … was Henry Geldzahler.’ When the director of the Met, Thomas Hoving, wanted to put on an Andrew Wyeth show, Geldzahler was against it – Wyeth’s figurative paintings were the very opposite of the art he believed in and succoured. But when it became clear the show would go ...”

“... impressed by Harrington’s acknowledgment of his debt to that profound enemy of republicanism, Thomas Hobbes, and to have noticed the purposes which, for all their obvious disagreements, Hobbes and Harrington shared. Hobbes is the subject of two strong essays. Quentin Skinner follows the erratic development of his attitude to the Classical tradition which ...”

“... acceptable face of Scottish communitarianism. His foremost predecessor, the anti-Unionist patriot Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun (1653-1716), has recently enjoyed some celebrity beyond Scotland in the wake of John Pocock’s voyages around the civic humanist tradition. Fletcher is immediately unsettling, with his vision of a Europe of city-states and his modest ...”

“... to Ronald Reagan. Those he dislikes, on the other hand, are little more than caricatures: Thomas Paine, for example, was ‘a man with a grudge against society, a spectacular grumbler’. No one seeking a fair-minded account of the American past will find it here. On the other hand, anyone who has wondered whether the history of the United States can ...”