“... approach of later scholars to Botticelli’s mythologies. Warburg’s fellow Florentine scholar Herbert Horne, for example, praised his ‘admirable little work’ and followed him in describing Primavera as ‘no mere illustration of some particular passage, but a cento of many ideas’. But almost no one followed him in every detail; Horne, for his ...”

“... massively in the leader polls and was far less popular than his party; the campaign, largely a matter of a few videos and avoiding the London press, was good only in comparison to Foot’s; and the Party was so ill-prepared that, despite four years of reflection, it was still chronically unsure even about such key issues as its taxation policy. For some ...”

“... the anthologist of political verse has the same kind of aims as the anthologist of cat verse: a matter of isolating a particular kind of subject-matter – in the latter case, feline quadrupeds; in the former, battles, royal weddings, Parliamentary debates, court and cabinet scandals, and so on. But poetry engages with ...”

“... associate directors, accused Teller of knowingly misrepresenting the technical facts of the matter, Teller and his allies had him hounded out of Livermore. Woodruff eventually fetched up at the rival Los Alamos weapons lab, where he was made very welcome, assuming a position whose title (‘program director for non-proliferation and arms ...”

“... Kant and themselves as contributors to a single discussion with a single subject matter’. They needed to realise, he said, that concepts ‘have a history’, punctuated not only by the thoughts of the great dead philosophers but also by events like the decline of the Greek city-state, the formation of Christendom, the rise of capitalism ...”

“... Modern School and reading for a scholarship to Cambridge. The smart book around that time was Herbert Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation of History, which took the 19th century to task for writing history with one eye on the future, and in particular for taking as the only path through the past the development of democratic institutions. On the Whig ...”

“... want anyway). ‘Oh, grumble, grumble,’ says R.15 October. The Earl of Pembroke, Henry Herbert, has died. I met him only once in July 1974 when I had to do a Kilvert recital in the Double Cube room at Wilton. He was charming and easy but it didn’t go well for all sorts of reasons, some sad, some comic. The evening was to have been introduced by ...”

“... fictions. Few practitioners of the social sciences have the confidence to invoke the ideals of Herbert Spencer and Henry James simultaneously. In his second volume, Runciman proceeds to his own substantive social theory. He remarks at the outset that he will here be concerned only with the explanatory segment of his overall prescriptions. But this involves ...”

“... of man hours’; there was always too much of it and the author of ‘every letter received’, no matter how reverential, had to be ‘checked out in the FBI’s central files’. But it was only to be expected that Hoover would be more popular than any president he served under, or any politician who might have checked his power in Congress. He was said to ...”

“... itself. That this was not an airy theoretical vision but something profoundly fell as well as a matter of necessary quotidian practice is shown by Vogt in passages like the following, written by Wagner in 1851, while at work on ‘Young Siegfried’, the germ from which The Ring of the Nibelung gradually emerged:My daily routine is now as ...”

“... many Anglo-Catholics, Andrewes was an iconic ancestor figure. Along with Richard Hooker, George Herbert and William Laud, this ‘right reverend Father in God’ seemed to embody Catholic continuity and spiritual moderation. The English Church, these men believed, had maintained amid all the upheavals of the Protestant reformation a via media between the ...”

“... quotes Wodehouse’s editor at Vanity Fair who remembered him as ‘self-effacing, slow-witted and matter of fact . . . I never heard him utter a clever, let alone a brilliant, remark.’ Wodehouse shows signs of impatience with this convention in The Code of the Woosters (1938) where Bertie drops some of his best witticisms to Jeeves: ‘It’s no use ...”

“... have the allusion I have just spotted to the song ‘Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life’ by Young and Herbert (from Naughty Marietta). ‘At last I’ve found thee,’ the line continues, picking up the idea of finding pain when paradise is lost, or has lost us. ‘Mistery’ suggests missing mastery as well as what we don’t know. Another reference: And there ...”

“... critical life they have taken on. The sonnets are, editorially and bibliographically, another matter entirely. They were, to begin with, not a book. At least some of them circulated initially in manuscript – the miscellaneous writer Francis Meres in 1598 praises Shakespeare’s ‘sugared sonnets among his private friends’, and while it is difficult ...”

“... by a recourse to non-facts. He tells Ronald Butt that, among others, Ramsay MacDonald and Herbert Morrison were Marxists: a good debating-point, but wrong. Indeed, one of the many striking things about the diaries is how often Labour leaders attempt to validate their opinions by such a recourse to the Party’s history; and how often, when they ...”