“... that in a lecture on Jacobitism I whitewashed the reputation of ‘Butcher’ Cumberland. More perplexing, however, was the irritation of a mature Roman Catholic student who came from the Lanarkshire rustbelt to the east of Glasgow, where sectarian tensions have outlived the heavy industries in whose cultures they once thrived. Simply by calling the ...”

“... Wittgenstein, this is the difference between working out what people are using words to do in a more or less shared family life and being a metaphysician living in a world (or a system) of your own making. After the lapidary assertions of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein’s philosophy is more domestic, ...”

“... though he didn’t make the most successful film made according to Dogme principles, which was Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen – wasn’t really a vow of chastity but of poverty, since any film made according to the principles would come in cheap. Disowning the kitsch manipulativeness of Hollywood style was a strategic way of claiming the moral high ground ...”

“... in the world, and it is widely envied for exactly that reason. All of which makes it even more surprising that in the last ten years, two companies in the DAX, the stock-market index of Germany’s thirty (now forty) biggest corporations, have experienced colossal implosions, caused by fraud. For one of them, it was a near-death experience; for the ...”

“... There will soon be more bodies in contemporary criticism than on the fields of Waterloo. Mangled members, tormented torsos, bodies emblazoned or incarcerated, disciplined or desirous: it is becoming harder, given this fashionable turn to the somatic, to distinguish the literary theory section of the local bookshop from the soft porn shelves, sort out the latest Jackie Collins from the later Roland Barthes ...”

“... diary a week before that ‘war becomes like life itself. It’s all there is: not a passion any more nor a hope. Like life, rather sad and resigned, it wears a tired face, seamed and worn, similar to our own.’ All over Europe young men were finding out much the same thing, but this scholar and essayist, the friend and colleague of Benedetto Croce, put the ...”

“... This ought not to matter in itself: an academic argument is not necessarily stronger because it is more clearly stated, or less potentially misleading because it is more concise. But the less transparently simple it is, or could ever be made without distorting its meaning, the ...”

“... that is, except one, Homo sapiens. Our entry in the Systema Naturae, devised by Linnaeus, says (more or less) ‘reader, know thyself,’ thus admitting the impossibility of seeing ourselves as others see us. Thanks to the discovery of fossils of extinct relatives of humanity, and the application of Darwinian evolution, the boundary between humanity and the ...”

“... who produced visual records of foreign scenery for Grand Tourists or other wealthy travellers to more exotic lands. In 1799, for example, when Thomas Girtin was nearing the height of his fame as a landscape ‘genius’, Lord Elgin offered him £30 a year to carry out a pictorial survey of Greek monuments in what was then ...”

“... propaganda, erotic titillation, sacred violence – the Golden Legend offered all these and more. Most obviously, it offered a way to hallow time. Governed by the liturgical year, beginning with Advent, the Legend presents each saint’s biography on his or her feast day, interspersed with chapters on the feasts of Christ and Mary and the times of ...”

“... were written by and for the French. But after Werther, and not least because of its success, many more German books were made over into English. The novel is made up of letters written by Werther to his best friend, supplemented by passages written by an ‘editor’. Werther comes across as something between a manic-depressive drama queen and a sensitive ...”

“... of national security. Before the coming of the railways, travel by water was normally faster and more reliable than travel by land. Consequently, being on a small island surrounded by the sea did not lead automatically to Britannia ruling the waves and the world: this geographical accident rather made early modern Britons particularly vulnerable to invasion ...”

“... What should we mean by ‘Reformation’? Was it a ‘paradigm shift’ of the kind proposed by Thomas Kuhn, a new set of answers to old questions, a Darwinian moment? Perhaps. For Felipe Fernández-Armesto, whose Reformation was published in 1996, it was not so much an event in the 16th century, or even an extended process, as a constant manifestation of the spirit of Christianity, at least from 1500 to the present day, ‘a continuing story, embracing the common religious experiences of Christians of different traditions worldwide ...”

“... house. He had done something similar on at least three previous occasions. But despite his efforts more than two hundred drawings are almost universally accepted today as being wholly or in part by his hand, and most experts would argue for a much higher figure. Substantial though these numbers are, it is clear that only a tiny fraction of the drawings that he ...”

“... out all the problems we’ve been having with our male identity. It says we should spend much more time together and exult in our hairiness and sliminess and zaniness. It says we should leave the women at home and go camping and take all our clothes off and rough-house in the woods. It says we should hang out more with ...”