“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”