“... from climbing mountains would over-tax the Parliamentary draftsmen. Meanwhile England’s self-exiled pulmonaires were multiplying, braced for what Fleming calls ‘a luxurious stretch on Death Row’. But didn’t Robert Louis Stevenson at Davos protest at the lack of luxury on Death Row? Shut in a kind of damned ...”

“... trouble. Lea had been elected to the US Senate in 1911 aged 31 and evidently had a penchant for self-publicity. With three junior officers and three sergeants, all Americans, he set off for Amerongen with the aim of snatching the Kaiser from Bentinck’s château and delivering him to Paris (or, as he much later bragged, to the US government, which would be ...”

“... and was posthumously demoted to second-tier status by the modernist criteria of difficulty and self-critique.This ambitious catalogue to an exhibition curated by Melissa Buron of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, brings fresh eyes and careful research to his work. James Tissot: Fashion and Faith, opened at the Legion of Honour Museum in San Francisco ...”

“... a tank firing fifty quid notes over the lawn’, as Dein put it. A year later, José Mourinho, the self-described ‘Special One’, rocked up from Portugal. In 2008, Sheikh Mansour and the Abu Dhabi United Group came for Manchester City. Meanwhile Ferguson kept on winning and winning until he retired. Leicester, somehow, won the Premier League in ...”

“... and extraction that characterised Britain’s colonial ventures, challenging the chauvinism and self-congratulation that was for so long the dominant mode.How should today’s multicultural British public respond to events that took place centuries ago but continue to reverberate? The cultural critic Michael Rothberg proposes the term ‘implicated ...”

“... memorable over the lifetime of an editor or his magazine. On the other hand, it isn’t at all self-evident, not to me at least, that a bad or mediocre book is superior to an effective or interesting book review simply on the grounds that a book is a book and the authors of books are nearer to God than the authors of reviews. No one would deny that reviews ...”

“... modest estimates of France’s genetic continuity. Although at times the creature of a national self-image, he was never a captive of it.Where do these retractions leave the quest for the identity of France? In the last and longest part of his work, Braudel develops the elements of another approach to it, more serious and less congenial to collective ...”

“... her, then casts him aside for the newly returned Clym … What does she want? … some form of self realisation … to attain herself. She does not know how … so romantic imagination says Paris and the beau monde. As if that would stay her unsatisfaction. Clym has found out the vanity of Paris and the beau monde. What then does he want? … his ...”

“... Duhauttoir; Françoise herself lent Danton some of the purchase price. A 1964 biographer, Robert Christophe, speculated that Françoise may have had a child by Danton, and that he paid an inflated price to settle his obligations. He certainly drew on the dowry for his upcoming marriage to Gabrielle Charpentier, whose father was a tax official and the ...”

“... job and that every intervention by an editor involves a small surrender of the soul.’ He had the self-regard of the incorrigible scribbler, then, but not much else, and it was Althusser, apparently, who dissuaded him from a purely literary career. Yet Praised Be Our Lords, volume two of the memoir, is a great book. Fluent, witty, argumentative for ...”

“... will so govern contrasting predicates as to reflect the tragi-comedy of the human condition. Thus Robert Burton (‘Democritus Junior’), the sad creator of the great Anatomy of Melancholy, is commemorated (1639) in the Cathedral at Christ Church, Oxford:         PAUCIS NOTUS   PAUCIORIBUS IGNOTUS                HIC JACET ...”

“... were often strong, his taste, whenever it took off on its own – the early enthusiasms for Robert Natkin, the later advocacy of Arthur Boyd – was unerringly awful. Either way, it hardly strengthened his cause. Take another critical position, more independent but more desperate. This critic is not encamped. There is one sort of art to which he ...”

“... for them, must be set in a broader historical and geographical context: namely the state and self-image of the nation in which the concerts have taken place almost uninterruptedly for a century and more. For the imperial Britain in which Henry Wood’s Proms began in the summer of 1895 was a very different place from the post-imperial Britain in which ...”

“... on their direction. Here’s a way to think about it: you live in a community that is entirely self-sufficient but produces one cash crop a year, consisting of a hundred crates of mangoes. In advance of the harvest, because it’s helpful for you to get the money now and not later, you sell the future ownership of the mango crop to a broker, for a dollar a ...”

“... investigative gaze; incidents lose their epic character; idols turn out to have feet of clay. The self-improving ethos, and with it the grand narrative of what Hudson refers to insistently as ‘the raising of the Working Class’, has disappeared without a trace (we are twice told that there is not a single bookshop in East Durham, only the paperback shelf ...”