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“... not that Vidal-Naquet is uninterested in exploring why the ‘malady’ took such a hold. It may have to do with politics and imperialism: a Spanish Atlantis provides Spain with a right to rule Atlantic territories. With nationalism: a Swedish Atlantis provides the Scandinavians with a glorious submerged antiquity. Or with anti-semitism: Atlantis ...”

“... by the 19th century had turned into an exotic northern Arcadia for intrepid British travellers. Richard Burton, William Morris, Anthony Trollope, Mrs Alec Tweedie and Sabine Baring-Gould all trooped to the land of pumice and geysers. Most were ravished by the spectacle but all eventually had to come to terms with Iceland as a real country, struggling and ...”

“... things like that?’ In his memoir – self-published, self-justifying – the chief of medicine, Richard Deichmann, claimed it was necessary to shut down the hospital fast because ‘patients with all kinds of serious infections … in intimate, unsanitary conditions with everyone else’ could be an ‘explosive incubator for an infectious disease ...”

“... Castor does not discuss this part of her career) and then when she ruled England briefly for Richard I as queen mother. This type of queenship can also be glimpsed in Castor’s references to Stephen’s consort, another Matilda, who raised an army to support him after his capture, and was praised by the Gesta Stephani for forgetting a woman’s weakness ...”

“... chronicle of scandalous goings-on among the Victorian middle classes claims that East Lynne may be ‘one of the most famous unread works in the English language’. Very possibly. Yet it was spectacularly successful in its day, and its popularity has turned out to be more durable than that of most publishing sensations. Newly literate novel-readers in ...”

“... Paine published The Age of Reason, ‘probably’, thinks Hitchens, in reaction to a sermon by Richard Watson, the bishop of Llandaff, though, as Paine himself tells us, he had not heard of the sermon until it was advertised in Watson’s reply to The Age of Reason, An Apology for the Bible. This is only a selection of the many errors in this book, and ...”

“... of our religion and the shame of our country.’ England’s political and commercial elite may have been able to stomach trade with the ‘Turk’, but there is no getting around the deep-rooted (if ill-informed) antipathy shared by large swathes of the population. Their attitude is reflected by Portia’s response in The Merchant of Venice, when the ...”

“... planning’ on the part of Daniel Yergin and Thane Gustafson, from whose book it comes. Though it may not, at first sight, appear any less plausible than a capitalist China ruled by the Chinese Communist Party would have seemed in the Sixties or Seventies, or a Japan producing high-quality, high-cost consumer goods for the world would have done in the ...”

“... receipts pour in, and the governing committee doubles his wages. His wife has feared that Gedge may now be ‘giving away the Show ... by excess’, as before he almost dished them by restraint – but the point, of course, is that no excess can be too much for the vulgar multitude. The only real difference between Gedge’s original position as librarian ...”

“... See another country, learn another language: advice as old as the Greeks. In May 1572, a very young man left England, in the words of his passport, ‘for his attaining to the knowledge of foreign languages’, but attached to a diplomatic mission, something more serious than a mere Grand Tour. He was a participant in the often menacing jollifications which accompanied the finalisation of an Anglo-French treaty and a marriage alliance with the house of Navarre ...”

“... Pillar in 1948. Vidal’s sly mockery of Michiko Kakutani, the paper’s leading book reviewer, may have goaded them into arthritic action. Yet the grumpy reaction to this book is partly – largely? – Vidal’s own fault. He has generated a Gore Glut which even the most skilful wave of Kaplan’s wand could not have whisked away. With the deft, evocative ...”

“... literary debate. Intellectual culture thrives upon debate. Although opponents of deconstruction may accuse it of nihilism and anti-humanism, nothing could be more humanistic than vigorous arguments about the nature and aim of literature. Deconstruction has forced traditionalists to look to their assumptions and protect their theoretical flanks. Defensive ...”

“... Within four hours of the explosions on 21 November five Irishmen – Paddy Hill, Gerry Hunter, Richard McIlkenny, Billy Power and Johnny Walker – were arrested at Heysham in Lancashire as they got off a train from Birmingham New Street which connected with the ferry to Belfast. A sixth man, Hughie Callaghan, was arrested the next day in Birmingham. The ...”

“... to Basho’s Narrow Roads of Oku: ‘my presumptuous and vague idea is that my introductions may simulate his diary and my papers, his poems’) are a compilation of Hamilton’s scientific publications from the first two-thirds of his career (1964-91). Each article is prefaced by an autobiographical account of its genesis and by other retrospective ...”

“... criticism of Israel is excessive, the earlier adulation was, and that an answer to present woes may be found in the history of Zionism, including the period just before the birth of the state described in Norman Rose’s ‘A Senseless, Squalid War’ and David Cesarani’s Major Farran’s Hat. Both books deal with the last years of the Mandate, when the ...”