“... and indeed, in the end, agrees with them (except about book titles). Still, whatever historians may say, legends of King Arthur have remained deep-rooted in popular imagination, giving rise to whole libraries of fiction, and one Hollywood movie after another. Higham’s aim is, first, to demolish the wild theories that have gained currency in recent ...”

“... since it is intended to be seen close to the spectator, every kind of finish possible to the hand may be wisely lavished; yet which is not a miniature, nor in any wise petty or ignoble. In the second, the figures are of life size, or a little more, and it represents the class of great pictures in which the boldest execution is used, but all brought to ...”

“... cut to Irishness – shamrocks, Guinness, lots of green things – while a little more knowledge may attach to him the legend that he is responsible for Ireland’s lack of snakes, having ordered them all to leave. The picture becomes more complicated for those who have discovered that he wasn’t Irish at all but from somewhere in the island of ...”

“... Vienna. Dolf was in Britain only temporarily, however, awaiting a visa for the United States. In May 1940, he sailed for New York. Joyce was devastated. Less than a month later, against all expectations, she went too. The American edition of Mrs Miniver had been selected as a Book of the Month Club Choice, and her publishers wanted her to promote it. Both ...”

“... you come to feel that the characters are really doing something quite old-fashioned. They may be media savvy and product-articulate, these yellow-faced goons, but in essence they go in for the kind of stuff that used to have people rolling in the aisles of the music halls. Homer Simpson is a kind of Grimaldi, an air-guitar-playing, nacho-chomping ...”

“... the whole is less than the sum of the parts. Field commanders, with their limited local knowledge, may have written dozens of reports referring to Jews as ‘useless mouths’ or ‘surplus population’, but that does not mean that the Holocaust was really about food shortages or land management. Why were these killers in the Soviet Union to begin with? Why ...”

“... to effect this wide ranging co-ordination. In fact, as Weber demonstrates, the second question may be harder to understand than the first, for by carefully unpacking the particulars of individual motivation, it becomes clearer what drives the sharing economy as a whole. Most developers, Weber observes, code FLOSS projects to fix a problem they are ...”

“... was 25 at the time, but the adolescent cast of this and many other letters written in his twenties may come as a surprise to those who know only the superbly controlled ironist of the published works. So may his taste for Swinburne, who evidently spoke to Strachey’s own tendency to luxuriate in suffering. (His hatred of ...”

“... spitefully and with anger’. Soon afterwards she’s having sex with the married Arion, who may be a spy working for the British against the Republicans. What she wants most, though, is a role in the conflict going on around her. At one point she throws herself onto the ground in front of a Republican activist shouting: ‘Oh God, make use of me or I ...”

“... they change every now and again, shows a strange relation to facts. On balance, Hill’s book may well be quite a good introduction for social workers to systems of social security, personal social services, the health service, education, employment services and housing: but oh, is it one-dimensional and uninspiring, even where it quotes the unorthodox ...”

“... enshrined in the mausoleum outside Tehran which has just been destroyed. Mohammed Reza Shah, too, may find himself embalmed in Egypt: but he will certainly have to wait for enshrinement in his native Iran. The former monarch’s main preoccupation now is to mull over how it all went wrong, as though the scattered pieces of the jigsaw puzzle could somehow be ...”

“... well-chronicled activities in France and historically decisive foundation of Normandy. All four may be described as coffee-table books, and all four sustain their publishers’ well-earned reputation for superb illustrations – though a symbolic reductio ad absurdum of modern techniques is the obliteration of much of David Wilson’s foreword to The Viking ...”

“... for breaking the rules he contrives still more firmly to despise the French for keeping them’ may sound a little bald, but a sarcasm about a sarcasm doesn’t comfortably cancel out into wholehearted approval. If Pope welcomed Boileau’s authority, and even ‘the Critick’s Law’ it partly rested on, he was more insistent and more eloquent than most ...”

“... thing who had had a wild youth, a sheep in wolf’s clothing. This reappraisal, however grotesque, may in part have been motivated by a sudden desire to be analytical and reasonably truthful, after all the intoxicating polemics: but in part, too, it would have involved the prudent, politic fear that if Foot is now leader of the Labour Party he might well be ...”

“... long been his most absorbing interest. The essay on historical inevitability from the early 1950s may be seen as the turning-point. Here Vico makes a brief appearance for the first time, and since then his writings have all belonged to his new field: they are gathered together in the volumes Against the Current, Russian Thinkers and Vico and Herder. The ...”