“... greater archaeological context: in the 1990s at Marina el-Alamein on the Mediterranean coast and, more recently, at er-Rubayat (ancient Philadelphia).Petrie’s finds from Hawara and Albert Gayet’s from Antinoöpolis both caused a sensation when they were exhibited, but the mummy portraits were not examined in great detail. For most of the following ...”

“... sort of way: I was the most recently hired editor at the imprint, one of its more highly paid staff members, and my list, though filled with erudite, well-written books, was not the most profitable. If anyone was for the chop, it was likely to be me. And the possibility of staff cuts seemed far from remote. The share price of the ...”

“... For more than two thousand years, classical culture – as a set of institutions and as a way of life – has been lamenting its own imminent extinction. By inventing the idea of ‘barbarity’ to be the antitype of their own ‘civilised’ values, the ancient Greeks prompted the fear that those barbarians (real or, for the most part, imaginary) would sooner or later triumph ...”

“... sonnet forms in English, and this is one of them, the Shakespearean. The other, the Petrarchan, is more coherent aesthetically, having only two rhymes in the octave (the first eight lines) and two more in the sestet (the last six), but it is much harder to write in English than in Italian, because English has fewer ...”

“... brother, Jonathan, was a grandmaster and ten times British chess champion. But there was much more to Roger’s puzzling than this. People who know little else about what he did may be familiar with the Penrose triangle, which shares space with Escher’s prints on the walls of student bedrooms around the world, or with Penrose tiling – tessellated ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is happening in Browning studies, one marked by the accession of new editions – do little more than try to base an ethical conclusion on what they take to be the psychology of what they take to be the Duke’s ‘character’; and though such probings are often acute and sensible, they hardly advance understanding of the poem beyond the critical ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... élite. In Hertfordshire, the most open of these three sample counties, new entrants never came to more than a third of the owners of big houses, and elsewhere they were almost always under a fifth. And these new names were not usually enriched by industry, but by government office, the professions, particularly law, or by finance. Only in brewing, as we ...”

“... One may be puzzled at this description and one might have wished that the good Doctor had been more precise in his definitions and delineations. Is it possible to note so exactly these different areas of London? No such doubts exist for Mr Lottman. There is an area in Paris which is called ‘the Left Bank’ and which is geographically recognisable in ...”

“... 17th century, a sort of Tillyardian monster with which our examiners are still wrestling. In more recent times, revisionism in the 17th century has created the opportunity to build a new coherence, but it cannot be said that this opportunity has yet been fully taken. These four books perhaps suggest that the time is coming when a synthesis will at last ...”

“... 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 ...”