“... Zealand, I did the kind of degree in which you are allowed to mix subjects. I spent my first year reading philosophy, geology and English. I never quite got a grip on these subjects, and certainly have not kept up with them, but the memory of what it is like to do philosophy or geology remains; and when I read about debates that are going on in these areas I ...”

“... you would write chronicles or treatises or poems in that language, not in the local vernacular. Peter Godman’s anthology of poems of the Carolingian period provides some remarkable instances of this international character of Medieval Latin. Here in the eighth and ninth centuries, if ever, is a true European literature. Among the poets associated with ...”

“... itself as a good and economical mass subject through a development of the technique of ‘close reading’, which is easily taught, and can be practised on a very small number of books. Williams has remarked that in his own criticism he found the method intoxicating but misleading, because it evaded structural problems and obscured questions of belief and ...”

“... Virtual History, though I must admit to initial reservations over both the title and the idea of reading, end to end, nine essays each subtitled: ‘what if ... ’ They explore the alternatives and counterfactuals at various junctures in modern history, from Cromwell to Gorbachev. In his Introduction, Niall Ferguson shows himself both erudite and cogent in ...”

“... is so much the random movement of the mind, from distant memory to close observation, from reading to reflection, and through a great range of feeling – anger, despair, love, regret, remorse, amusement, in rapid transition. But his situation in the Detention Centre compound is a point of focus; and there is a marvellous particularity, and a unifying ...”

“... Burckhardt, whose Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, written in 1860, is still required reading on its subject; and Johan Huizinga, who wrote in Burckhardt’s shadow about the same centuries (though not the same area), and in 1919 achieved the same with The Autumn of the Middle Ages. Huizinga (pronounced ‘Housing-ha’) was born in 1872, the son ...”

“... not always right,’ declared H.D. after analysis in Vienna. Her judgment seems rather generous. Reading her Tribute to Freud, one can’t ignore the emotional and interpretative coercion that went on at 19 Berggasse under the name of science. To an alarming degree, theory preempted argument. H.D. had been abandoned by her husband, Richard Aldington, for ...”

“... 20th-century cult of childhood is that the illusions he could never escape did not deceive him. Peter Pan’s appeal to the audience to save Tinker Bell’s life is irresistible: ‘Do you believe in fairies? Say quick that you believe! If you believe, clap your hands!’ Brave little Tink is saved every time. Some really did have faith in ...”

“... of Sporting Ladies (c. 1770) is typical of many entries from whores’ directories included by Peter Wagner in Eros Revived. Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, published regularly between 1760 and the early 1790s, prided itself on providing up-to-date information for the sporting gentlemen of London, including full details of starting prices and hot ...”

“... refuted and denounced them. Only in the present generation have historians like Robert Mandrou and Peter Burke seriously attempted to ascertain what was going on beneath the surface. In Montaillou Le Roy Ladurie utilised one lucky cache of evidence. Professor Ginzburg has found another. Domenico Scandella, known as Menocchio, lived from 1532 to 1599 or ...”

“... Bacon as menacing as ever. He has not petered out, and even his critics admit his achievement. Peter Fuller who ‘turns away from Bacon’s work with a sense of disgust and relief’ also describes him as ‘a good painter, arguably the nearest to a great one to have emerged in Britain since the war’. And greatness is, Bacon says, the only thing worth ...”

“... and Edward Shanks. Can it be that he belongs in such forgotten company? Is his a just neglect? Reading the life, one must conclude that if he indeed had a genuine poetic gift, he had other qualities of mind and character that worked against that gift, and that his principal talent was for turning his disadvantages to even greater disadvantage, for ...”

“... than a common cold. The uncertainty is real. Onc Doc’s skills are essentially statistical. Reading papers that include and conclude from other studies the mean average lifetime chances. But I’m not a statistic. As an individual, who knows? A friend of mine in his eighties had received chemotherapy and was feeling much better; along with his ...”

“... What exactly do we know about Peter Sellers? There have been at least half a dozen biographies before this one, and through them the outline of his career has become pretty familiar. We know that he was born in 1925, the only son of a Jewish mother, that his parents worked in a touring theatre company, and that during the war he joined the RAF and performed in Ralph Reader’s Gang Shows ...”

“... to mind. But it turned out that there was no mystery, no sinister revelation to give weight to Peter Ackroyd’s appropriation of Hawksmoor’s buildings as stages for the malevolent and occult. Although the burials had been decent and officially sanctioned, the bodies were there contrary to the intentions of the Commissioners appointed under an Act of ...”