“... as ‘a bohemian rebellion against established society which came to prominence about 1956’; David Ignatow’s poetic idiom as ‘Brooklynese speech’. But at least it doesn’t pretend to be more than it is – a ‘companion’, not a history. I wish I could say the same for the season’s lot of general surveys, which look so authoritative to the ...”

“... and time. But tabling the world in that way, and enjoying its benefits, involves standardised means of representation, and these standards had to be invented, fought for and secured. The standardisation of the world, like its ‘disenchantment’, is a much misunderstood business. No intellectual passions are stronger than those involved in achieving ...”

“... essay Wolfgang Kemp gives special attention to the highly controversial frame that Caspar David Friedrich designed for his Cross in the Mountains. It consists of a gothic arch composed of palm fronds, and a predella decorated with wheat, a vine and a diagrammatic eye. In 1808 Friedrich exhibited the painting in this frame in his studio before sending ...”

“... speech on the evening of 21 July. The chorus of praise for the Mansion House speech was by no means confined to the Conservatives: the Daily Chronicle and Daily News both responded with enthusiastic leaders. Lloyd George had pulled off a political coup. Had he also started to acquire an enduring understanding that Britain would have to go to ...”

“... and sacrifice, by further infusions of Soviet subsidy, and by all-encompassing, though by no means exclusively repressive, systems of social control. But this was never a system which could achieve self-sufficiency in food, let alone adapt and innovate enough to keep Cuba abreast of developments in the outside world. It was not a system, therefore, which ...”

“... well, well, what do we have here?’ But where, really is the fun in that? For one thing, it means that the victim of the plant knows everything. He is not compelled to wonder which of his colleagues and brothers is the fink or the nark. For another – and call me an old sentimentalist if you will – it runs the slight risk of offending the ...”

“... King reports here, is the only surviving 18th-century African artefact associated with slavery. David Dabydeen has pointed out that the very word ‘patron’ could at this point mean both connoisseur and slave-owner. It would be intriguing to know whether the peculiar interest which Sloane had in tobacco and its paraphernalia was connected with his other ...”

“... as a result of hard thinking about England’s national and international economic condition. Like David Katz, whose study of Cromwell’s proposal of 1655 to readmit the Jews to England argued that that scheme owed nothing to economic calculation and everything to millenarian belief, Pincus is sometimes willing to discount economic motivation altogether. At ...”

“... there has been a tendency to find the key to the universe in the curl of a teenager’s lip, in David Bowie’s lipstick or Janis Joplin’s hair. The shapings of history, the contours of time and place, are to be found in the stirrings of drum and guitar; or, deep as dimples, high as a quiff, on the heads of King and Queen Rockers from this time and ...”

“... Verse: ‘Art, as the late Professor R.G. Collingwood pointed out, is not Magic, i.e. a means by which the artist communicates or arouses his feelings in others, but a mirror in which they may become conscious of what their own feelings really are: its proper effect, in fact, is disenchanting.’ Similarly, when he writes in 1932, It is going ...”

“... from that quarter, ‘English’ at Cambridge was to be the prosecution of Liberalism by other means. At least this made a change from the agendas of scholars whose politics were less readily discernible, such as W.W. Greg, founder of the Malone Society, editor of Henslowe, author of The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare, and left it until later in life to ...”

“... no new taxes’ Bush, and Bill ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman’ Clinton. David Schippers, the majority counsel of the House Judiciary Committee, hammered home the point in the course of his peroration during last winter’s impeachment proceedings: ‘The President, then, has lied under oath in a civil deposition, lied under oath in a ...”

“... at the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. She pre-empted the humiliation by suicide – either by means of her trademark asp (which, as the symbol of Egyptian monarchy, turned her death into a defiant assertion of her royal power) or, as some ancient writers thought, thanks to some more mundane poison. ‘I will not be triumphed over,’ Livy has her ...”

“... dat animum (‘It is the holy love of the fatherland which moves us’). Half a century ago, Dom David Knowles, doyen of humane medievalism, hailed the MGH among the ‘great historical enterprises’, which it certainly was (and is) despite its original nationalist agenda. Medievalist Wissenschaft (the term has scientific connotations largely absent from ...”

“... North London suburb and in New York, bears the impress of American writers like Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace, clever, nervy exhibitionists, IQs-with-i-Books, guys who, as Smith has put it, ‘know things’, writers with a gift for speedy cultural analysis, whose prose is choppy with interruption. The Autograph Man may indeed be the nearest that a ...”