“... 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 ...”

“... emphatic, but which by itself seems hardly worth saying. ‘Young people appear then to have been more promiscuous... than married adults.’ Even allowing for all kinds of cultural change, that seems always likely to have been (on average) true. So what is this book trying to tell us? That some things never change? Actually, I am sure the book is not trying ...”

“... in cunning, efficiency and common sense and would easily have won the war if they had had a bit more money. And he is consistently, sometimes wittily, scornful of the anaesthetising rhetoric dispensed at all but the very lowest levels of the War Effort, both at home and in the field. Here he somewhat undercuts his own vehemence by having to concede that the ...”

“... in Bengal. She got out of this by eloping to Ireland with her mother’s admirer, Lieutenant Thomas James. The shotgun marriage soon failed, however, and she escaped by way of another scandalous affair, with another lieutenant (called Lennox), who dumped her penniless in London just as James began suing for adultery. Rather sensibly, Eliza resolved to ...”

“... it again on publication of this new version, though it must be a comfort that for a decade or more his arguments have also attracted much intelligent support. For my part I think he’s right about the detail of the paintings, and his explanations of why they are as they are – why they attend so insistently to the genitalia of Jesus in infancy, during ...”

“... train or ship. If there was something of Baudelaire about Larbaud, there was also a touch of Terry-Thomas. Larbaud’s best-known work is probably the novel Fermina Marquez, about a Colombian beauty who sows sentimental-erotic havoc among the students at a boys’ boarding school – the missing link, one might say, between The Red and the Black and The ...”

“... when Natalya Goncharova and Pushkin were betrothed she ‘gave him her cold timid hand’. This is more plausible than St John of the Cross biting his lip: a formal betrothal would have involved the extending of hands and made most girls timid, while Moscow in April would have made their hands cold. It is not a banal comment. Though there is a suitable ...”

“... and southern Holland in the event of a German attack on those countries – an operation which had more to be said for it at that time than in the changed circumstances of May 1940. The British tamely accepted French plans which they were subsequently to blame for the disaster. Moreover, few British officers expressed any doubts about the efficiency and ...”

“... often do’. He was also very conscious that the age-gap between himself and the Commando HQ was more than ten years. ‘They needed to have confidence in my judgment, confidence which could not be risked by my revealing too many reservations, or seeking too much reassurance.’ At a critical stage the colonel had the opportunity to pull back his ...”