“... Many (I include myself) find that vision cheering. But it is a mirage. Plato was guilty of gross exaggeration. And his own case shows how even the most intellectual of Greeks could wallow in the glorious mud of religiosity. As for the sceptics, their very mockery itself testifies to the popular force of ritual and myth: there would have been little ...”

“... accurate assessment of poverty in India, calculating the earliest estimates of the country’s gross income per capita and showing that basic provisions for Indian prison inmates gave them a higher standard of living – on paper – than ordinary Indian peasants. In a series of publications including the much read pamphlet The Poverty of India, Naoroji ...”

“... a counter-Fenian agency – Winston Churchill lambasted it in the House of Commons for its ‘gross boastfulness’: ‘It is written, if I may say so, in the style of “How Bill Adams Won the Battle of Waterloo”. The writer has been so anxious to show how important he was, how invariably he was right, and how much more he could tell if only his mouth ...”

“... Teeth exposed what Luttwak rightly calls the ‘tenth-century military renaissance’, and John Haldon, who has written extensively on Byzantine armies. Although Luttwak’s style reflects his journalism, his analyses are solidly rooted in recent Byzantine studies, which, as he observes in his preface, ‘have flourished as never before’. He ...”

“... says, he learned painting from a certain ‘Jean-Babeuf Audubon’, presumably a near relative of John James Audubon. On returning to England, he ‘lived the life of a rat’ for twenty years; he was eventually arrested in Bristol, accused of forgery and transported to Van Diemen’s Land. After causing maximum offence with a series of satirical paintings ...”

“... but was already with Alfred and had recently had an affair and a child with the psychoanalyst Otto Gross, who briefly upset her by starting a relationship with her sister Frieda. (Frieda’s next husband but one was D.H. Lawrence.) Marianne and Else were at Weber’s bedside together when he died, aged 56, in 1920. Marianne died in Else’s arms at 84 in ...”

“... whilst taking measurements in front of your man, but on his right side. To do so is to commit a gross piece of familiarity, rather offensive in all cases.’ My tailor was Kevin Levett, who apprenticed to Poole’s in 1989 at the age of 16 and is now a director at the firm. He has a waxed moustache and was wearing a charcoal three-piece suit, with a gold ...”

“... loss of her daughter – that fixed her reputation.I never met Didion or her husband, the novelist John Gregory Dunne, but in September 1974 I heard Didion speak one evening in the Branford College common room at Yale. Dunne was there as well, stepping in when her voice began to trail off. I was teaching a non-fiction seminar on Wednesday evenings that year ...”

“... against the authoritarian powers of China and Russia and has found an influential reader in John McCain, an old-style promoter of American toughness. But it’s now quite hard to imagine Hu Jintao and Vladimir Putin, not to mention Osama bin Laden and other ‘enemies of the Free World’, quivering at the thought of a ‘concert of ...”

“... well as respecting him. If he thought them, like Hobsbaum, professionally competent despite their gross and obstinate follies, he would still back them when they applied for jobs. One belief he shared with some whom he scorned was that a university English department should be so constituted as to offer its undergraduates a wide variety of critical ...”

“... feel, imagine or remember which, in their judgment, requires to be curtailed or cancelled.’ John Wing is taken to task for remarking that a young woman’s grief-stricken response to the death of her husband is a ‘typical depressive reaction’: ‘Her grief and mourning are looked upon as a pathological syndrome. The basic decisions are of a ...”

“... correspondents. To identify neo-Marxism with the Militant, neo-Trotskyite faction is simply gross ignorance or crude polemics. True, the Militant faction has taken over a few Constituency Parties: but they have yet to produce a single MP. As the spirits of Constituency Parties, left-wing indeed, revive, so, too, will active membership; and the rank and ...”

“... pack up and go home. She will like the illustrated edition of Priestley’s English Journey. John Hadfield, the picture editor, has found photographs – some taken by people like Humphrey Spender and Bill Brandt who went to the North because they had read Priestley’s book – which illustrate the text with astonishing exactness. Yet the photographs of ...”

“... a 1386 copy of Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon, or history of the world, now in the library of St John’s, Oxford, the text is followed not only by an index, but also by an account of how to use it: ‘This number, 72, indicates that the heading from the table can be found on the leaf where 72 is written in the top corner.’ Unfortunately, the scribe copied ...”

“... of Oxford, Museum of Natural History Here at last is an authority who considers it a ‘gross simplification’ to argue that the marble sculpture of ancient Greece and Rome was completely covered in opaque paint. Why, if this was always so, bother to extract and transport with such difficulty, and at such cost, the finest Parian marble? And why was ...”