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“... is it kind like a worker ant, like one of our own skin cells, programmed in earlier aeons to be self-sacrificing without choice? Or is it kind in the way that people are kind: innate inclination shaped by social learning, with the implication that other courses of action are possible? Of course the ape, or the human being, who learns a local custom may ...”

“... expertise To which they gave their best Desires and energies. Such oily handed zest Bypassed the self like love. But the factory, and the soul-destroying drudgery of assembly line work, was the fate of most. Autopia doesn’t adequately address this, either. There is a report from the assembly line, but it’s written by a student of technology, Dirk ...”

“... Lhuyd, whose work in Celtic philology would in the long run help to clear away the lumber of self-serving ethnic origin myths. The omission of Ireland, however, is more serious. The two-way links between Presbyterianism in the North of Ireland and its principal seminary, the University of Glasgow, contributed variously to the shaping of Scottish moral ...”

“... media than in the hierarchy between them. Gauguin called the ear ‘inferior to the eye’, and Robert Delaunay confessed, in a letter to Franz Marc, that he was ‘horrified by music and noise’ and mistrusted ‘auditory perception’. August Endell, an architect associated with the Jugendstil movement, believed that no visual art had yet succeeded in ...”

“... two extra hours of Downton-free life. This latest crop of period narratives probably began with Robert Altman’s film Gosford Park (2001): at best, a mildly amusing self-conscious pastiche, though it wasn’t clear why a film-maker who could produce Nashville and Short Cuts would bother. The writer credited with Gosford ...”

“... case of the officer class, sheltered believers in empire, deference and loyalty. Second Lieutenant Robert Darley, gazetted in the Royal Regiment of Artillery on 10 February 1915, followed in his father’s footsteps. Born in 1859, George saw action in the Boer War. As a teenager I’d occasionally hazarded what the daily familiarity with death and fearful ...”

“... artistic sensibility he comes closest to the German Romantics: perhaps most of all to the composer Robert Schumann, born just a year after Poe, whose fantasy pieces – inconclusive, fragmentary, whimsical and haunting – Poe probably never heard. A novelist of Ackroyd’s talents could have anticipated the risk involved in starting at the end of his ...”

“... was getting started, to a Yorkshire collector, Henry Savile, and then to the antiquary Sir Robert Cotton, whose books came mostly from the dissolution of the monasteries. The Cottonian library also contained the sole extant copy of Beowulf, which in 1731 narrowly escaped destruction in a serious fire. After a spell in the Bodleian the collection ...”

“... without ethnic or geographic cohesion are ideological libertarians. Wisconsin was the home of Robert La Follette Sr, the Senate’s greatest progressive, and of Joseph McCarthy, its most infamous reactionary. It has voted for Democratic presidential candidates in every election since 1988. But off-year elections with low voter turnout – and ...”

“... recalled that in the summer of 1955 he wrote a lecture on Yeats’s poem ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’, which, as he liked to put it 26 years later, ‘turned almost spontaneously into a book’, namely, Romantic Image. The book does have the assured, focused quality of an argument that writes itself, which may obscure what a bold move it ...”

“... In particular, he praises Baldwin’s careful fostering of Labour, which was done partly from self-interest (socialists made easier targets than Liberals) but partly also from a disinterested desire to provide a constitutional context for inevitable social change. Certainly, however culpable Baldwin may have been of ‘putting party before country’ in ...”

“... rather than a succession of brilliantly-lit set-pieces, but the whole thing has such extraordinary self-assurance that complaints soon die away.That calm eccentric boldness is, for reasons I can’t pretend to know, a stylistic habit of the present moment, but only of some women writers. Perhaps they have rediscovered and modernised kinds of attention, kinds ...”

“... every weekend and becomes an urban beach.The story of the M8 starts with the Bruce Report in 1945 (Robert Bruce was Glasgow’s chief engineer). It is remembered for two startling proposals: first, the destruction of almost all of the city centre and its architecturally significant buildings, including the School of Art, Kelvingrove Art Gallery, the Mitchell ...”

“... In​ How to be Topp (1954), Nigel Molesworth unveils ‘the Molesworth Self-Adjusting Thank-you Letter’. The sender is instructed to strike out the words which don’t apply, before thanking the present-buyer for theTrain. Tractor. germ gun. kite.delicious present. sweets.Space pistol. Toy socks.The letter ends with a blank space to be filled in with a date to remind the recipient when the next present is due ...”

“... also skirts the actual teaching of the subject in the universities. Nor is he convinced by Robert Crawford’s claim that English literature as an academic field was ‘invented’ in the universities of Enlightenment Scotland, where in 1762 Hugh Blair became the first incumbent of the Regius Chair of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at Edinburgh. According ...”