“... him to the Virgin and Child. They are St John the Baptist and two kings, Edward the Confessor and Edmund the Martyr, whose jewelled golden crowns are similar to his own. On the right panel, Mary is flanked by refined feminine angels in sapphire blue, each crowned with a floral garland and bearing the king’s own insignia, the badge of the ...”

“... ceremony. The task he set himself as a historian of comparative religion was to assemble what Edmund Leach called ‘snippets of exotic ethnography’ into a suggestive portrait of a lost world before civilisation. Like near contemporaries such as Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, his was a work of synthesis, densely sourced and annotated but sweepingly ...”

“... Even fruit could not escape his portentousness. He liked apples on account of their ‘snow-white meat and ruddy cover’, but it was ‘a metaphysical appetite, for I do not care for their taste’.Schwartz sometimes worried that his intellectualism was willed rather than authentic. In his autobiographical notes, he described ‘trying as before to ...”

“... indictment as decisive in Irish – or at least in Mulvaney’s – eyes: If black is black or white is white, in black and white it’s down, You’re only traitors to the Queen and rebels to the Crown. If print is print or words are words, the learned Court perpends: – We are not ...”

“... when an apparent suicide pilot crashed a single-engined Cessna airplane on the south lawn of the White House in 1994, jokers suggested it might be the CIA director trying to get an appointment with the president. The anti-Communist revolt that began at Herat in western Afghanistan in March 1979 originated in a government initiative to teach girls to ...”

“... of draught animals nor of the wheel. The Anasazi also produced beautiful pottery decorated with white and black geometric designs, built sophisticated irrigation systems and erected astronomical and solar observatories. Man Corn, however, makes no attempt to deal in detail with any of these aspects of Anasazi society. Instead, it concentrates ...”

“... He let the Victorian values down gently. As the values blur, the topiary comes sharply into focus: white hair cascading in patriarchal fashion, beards trimmed and buffed into the emblematic shape of a utensil (spades, mostly) or an armament (Samuel Butler has a ‘torpedo beard of silver grey’). These are hairstyles with attitude. Butler’s torpedo beard is ...”

“... as an instrument of cultural, hence political, hegemony – as a subtle fraud devised by dead white males to reinforce ethnic and sexist oppression, and hinder social change. But he also attacks, usually in tones of benignly lugubrious authority, other critical movements such as the New Historicism, rather less overtly political in tendency, which by ...”

“... for later generations. Technical advances soon acted as a spur to artists and publishers alike. Edmund Evans, after about 1870, perfected the technique of colour-printing from wood blocks, and thereby opened the way for that celebrated trio of the late 19th century, Crane, Caldecott and Kate Green-away – vigorous, sportive and quaint respectively. Whalley ...”

“... seething with wit and brilliance from the likes of Johnson, David Garrick, Sir Joshua Reynolds and Edmund Burke, courtly politicians, cheerful whores, fine lords and ladies, down-at-heel actresses, a time of ‘free-flowing claret and sexual anarchy’, as Roger Hutchinson puts it. Strutting and tumbling through it all – and, of course concocting this ...”

“... conscience on the Anglican priest. (This part of the story is adapted, very movingly, from Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son.) At Oxford, and desperately poor, Oscar is serenely confident God will provide, and so he does, at the race track and dog fights and the card table. A toss of a coin convinced him that God needs him as a missionary to New South ...”

“... likely extent of his readers’ acquirements. A great many people know that dentists commonly wear white jackets; a smaller but still substantial section of society has had the opportunity of observing that stewards on passenger aircraft are (or at one time were) similarly attired. Almost anybody of sufficient education to find the word ‘haemophilia’ even ...”

“... in a quite unprecedented way on their right to pass judgment on the deeds of important dead white males, and to tell and publish the story of the polities that they lived in. Bridget Hill neglects this broader intellectual context for a more narrowly biographical approach in this study of Catharine Macaulay, but hers is still a considerable achievement ...”

“... wasn’t, or wasn’t only, a pulp craftsman embittered by the faint praise he’d been lobbed by Edmund Wilson before the likes of Eliot and Auden announced themselves as fans. Slick magazine writers were no good either – ‘their scenes are almost tiresomely neat … but they are little men who have forgotten how to pray’ – and when discussing the ...”

“... up as a woman when the moon is full. Scobie is the best kind of Orientalist. He walks like ‘a White Man at large’, and he loves the Egyptians. ‘You see, the Egyptians are marvellous, old man,’ he tells Darley. ‘Kindly. They know me well. From some points of view they might look like felons, old man, but felons in a state of grace, that’s what I ...”