“... of received opinion, and another considerable public has been assured by those who like the piety more than the poetry. The stratagems of the imagist method have long ago been absorbed into ordinary reading habits; the quotations and allusions have all been identified and accepted without remark. So it is a little difficult to see what is left for criticism ...”

“... the last war, American officers in London nightclubs were also said to favour this method, and more recently, in various underdeveloped countries, we are told that the wealthy have been seen to impress the indigenous poor by this same eccentric display of contempt for the real value of money. It is doubtful whether this simple yet complicated ploy ...”

“... challenges in mind. Apart from its title sequence, his second book, Airy Hall (1989), was a much more troublesome affair, showing the pressure of a more discursive and politically complex area of his imagination, at some cost to clarity and impetus. ‘The Kitchen Bitch’, an ambitious but clotted narrative, seemed ...”

“... Swann is obsessed by what he doesn’t know about Odette. His anguish has no remedy; finding out more only adds to what he does know about her. Since Kant, lots of philosophers have suffered from a generalised and aggravated form of the same complaint. They want to know what the world is like when they aren’t thinking about it; what things are like, not ...”

“... with its numinous landscapes that ‘never existed on earth’. The imagined Palestine mattered more than the actual place. ‘I don’t want to know where it is,’ Lawrence remarked. ‘I never want to go to Palestine.’ For many, this habit of thought was constantly reinforced by the extraordinary persistence of The Pilgrim’s Progress as a template ...”

“... and Russians in unconvincing native disguises sometimes ventured into the contentious territories, more usually both sides made use of proxies. Hence the phrase ‘tournament of shadows’, a coinage of the Russian Foreign Minister, Count Nesselrode. The British used Indian pandits who had been carefully trained in the skills of surveying and espionage. The ...”

“... Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and whatever else flew into your consciousness) you got something more like a second-hand bookshop – a place where you could rummage pleasurably for hours and come away with a quite different idea from what you thought you might have been looking for. There are no amateur readers like myself represented in Goffman’s ...”

“... harsh: frosts arrived a little later in the year, snows thawed a little earlier, and harvests were more abundant. Quebec soon became an improbable cause célèbre of Enlightenment climatology. For Pehr Kalm, a disciple of Linnaeus, it was a paragon of good colonial husbandry. The French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon went further. He saw in ...”

“... early, often when the girls were still infants; there would likely be a series of explorations, more or less serious, before one intricate set of negotiations made it to completion. Since it was rarely wise to marry a daughter into one of the noble families of one’s own realm and thus disturb political balances, the consequence for the princess was ...”

“... the same true of his friend Kingsley Amis, who hazarded the shrewd guess that Larkin published no more novels because he feared failure, in that genre, of the power to keep going with his own separate world of art? It seems likely that Amis has done something which in terms of the novel may be more difficult, and that is to ...”

“... that he is insufficiently understood. Few political writers anywhere and at any time have been more prolific or had more impact on their contemporaries. His newspaper The Political Register, which appeared at intervals between 1802 and 1835, sold at its peak of popularity up to 70,000 copies an issue and was read by ...”

“... are entirely confident that whatever limited niche they allot the judiciary, the judges will be more than happy to squeeze dutifully into it. They should be made to think again. I like to think that if he were suddenly transposed to the present, Lord Russell of Killowen, with his experience of the Parnell Commission and his 19th-century Irish ...”

“... for her body ‘as it was the last time she really liked it’. And lo, she finds herself once more housed in the ‘serviceable and agreeable’ form she possessed some fifteen years earlier, bearing some marks of experience (an appendix scar), but otherwise compact, neat, strong. She feels wonderful. ‘I can go in the streets, she said to herself, and ...”

“... the name of God was blasphemy and the penalty was stoning to death. The prohibition is stated in more general and familiar terms in the third commandment (Exodus 20.7). The idea got more complicated when applied to the more complicated God of Christianity; for instance, it was blasphemy ...”

“... snaps her fingers at the law and all its pains and punishments and cries out for new victims and more gold. Can that woman sleep?’Restell monetised the desperation of other women into a supremely lucrative business. In 1860, the Chicago Tribune reported that ‘she has three grandchildren who will inherit about $400,000 when Madame Restell turns up her ...”