“... 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 ...”

“... be vulgar. One Tower of Giotto is sublime; a row of Towers of Giotto would be only like a row of white posts. The poetry of art is in beholding the single tower; the poetry of nature in seeing the single tree; the poetry of love in following the single woman; the poetry of religion in worshipping the single star. And so, in the same pensive lucidity, I find ...”

“... an Imperial officer, remaining in the service through the Great War and the Civil War until the White collapse in 1920. And he published his first and last book of verse. It was meanly reviewed by Gumilev. Folklore says that Gumilev met Mirsky on the street and said, ‘Not bad for a Guards officer,’ whereupon the author sent a footman to buy up all the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 18 now known to have been killed: John Ashton, William Bradshaw, Thomas Buckley, James Crompton, Edmund Dawson, Margaret Downes, William Evans, William Fildes, Samuel Hall, Mary Heyes, Sarah Jones, John Lees, Arthur O’Neill, Martha Partington, John Rhodes, Joseph Whitworth, and two special constables, John Ashworth and Robert Campbell. There were ...”