“... claiming any political alignment, Bloom erupts with comparable regularity and force. He prefers to be a one-man cultural opposition, waving only the banner of aesthetics; he says there are no Bloomians, but everybody knows him and all wonder, usually with exasperated affection, what he will do next. He is exceptionally and systematically well-read, and ...”

“... and Raymond Aron, future historians of French intellectuals in the Eighties and Nineties may well be condemned to structuring their narratives around the post-Marx brothers of French intellectual life, Bernard-Henri Lévy and Alain Finkielkraut. This is not a case simply of contemporary thinkers being dwarfed by the giants ...”

“... Indeed, one of Luther’s motives for scorning the Old Testament was his apprehension at its use by peasant rebels who were calling for a reversion to total observance of Mosaic law, in a new fundamentalism. Some were even having themselves circumcised, he reported. In England the response was less extreme but much deeper. ...”

“... ways a reincarnation of the ideal virtuoso and Grand Tourist. He was first drawn to the subject by the Roman landscapes of Richard Wilson; published a book on Wilson’s then little-known drawings; and went on to annotate the letters written from Rome in 1757 by a minor British painter who had mentioned Wilson and other ...”

“... has been an unseemly rush to cash in on the discovery with at least six books, a poor film made by the BBC, several websites and the syndication of photographic rights across the globe. Peter Firstbrook’s book is written from a very English perspective, Ghosts of Everest from a very American one: neither takes up the really important issues. The Last ...”

“... of them? We heard that they ‘melted away’, that their units were ‘severely degraded’ by allied air strikes. Yet few if any journalists met any members of the Republican Guard, saw them in action, saw them get killed, saw them get bombed, or saw them sneak away home. We don’t know who gave their commanding officers the orders that resulted in ...”

“... Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) set out to increase American purchasing power by getting the unemployed back to work. For the most part they planted forests, graded roads and developed outdoorsy holiday resorts, but the WPA also recruited 40,000 writers, theatrical workers, musicians and artists, most of them on relief, to work on four ...”

“... to visit the animals: ‘Meet your brothers, take them to your hearts and respect them.’ But as David Hancocks colourfully describes, most precursors of the modern zoo have been the opposite of this, from the circuses of Rome to the travelling menageries of the 18th and 19th centuries, shuttered in so that passers-by got ...”

“... On the morning of 5 August 1840, a large pleasure boat chartered by a Frenchman was under steam at London Bridge. The owners of the Edinburgh Castle seem to have been remarkably incurious about the expedition. The day before, guns and ammunition, bundles of printed proclamations, a large amount of cash, sixty uniforms and several horses had been taken on board ...”

“... campaigns, and Obama needs all the friends he can get: he is trailing Hillary Clinton nationally by nearly 20 per cent and is 30 points behind in California. You’d think Obama would be doing better, particularly out here in California, one of the more progressive of the blue states, and where youth, good looks and fast ...”

“... was straightforward, pious, brave in a crisis, not especially bright. Her whole life was shaped by her mother’s straightforwardness and bravery in a crisis: when Henry VIII wanted Katherine to accept that she had never been married to him, she refused to do so, and by her unchanging refusal, gave her daughter an example ...”

“... between the film director and the actor that their involvement isn’t permanent: the actor may be offered a more desirable part, or the director may feel the need to make a different kind of film. The separation is often painful because the collaboration can be intense, especially so if they had loved each other. In the ...”

“... in pursuit of someone or something, or were being pursued themselves. These characters tended to be outsiders – ‘knuckle men’, Gypsies, tortured rock stars – who were in touch with the ‘old ways’ (sometimes the ‘auld ways’) and lived in tune with nature. They dug and they worked the land and they fought and they snared rabbits, and they were ...”

“... the earliest advocate of women’s rights. The term ‘feminism’ and its tradition postdate her by at least half a century; she appears to have intensely disliked most women; and she celebrated qualities of mind that she tended to label ‘masculine’ or ‘manly’. In the works for which she is best known, A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and A ...”

“... death), the seriousness and the sitter’s sober prosperity do not. When modern caricaturists like David Levine put pulled-about faces on small bodies their drawings project a more distinct personality than is found in their source material – usually paintings and photographs. The characterless little heads and drawn-out bodies of fashion plates do the ...”