“... for itself. In their own day, Gaston’s book and Edward’s version of it had considerably more impact than did Charny’s Book of Chivalry. Only two manuscripts of that work survive, against 19 known manuscripts of The Master of Game and 46 of the Livre de chasse. For a modern reader, however, Charny is likely to have greater interest. The hunting ...”

“... research position and the flashy job title of ‘philosopher and mathematician’. To his more paranoid or prescient contemporaries, the transfer looked like slow suicide, and those of his Venetian friends who were still talking to him after his shabby horse-trading begged him to return to the Serenissima’s haven of intellectual freedom, where ...”

“... provincial capital: by the mid-1880s, a decade after Unification, its population had risen to more than 1.3 million and it was the focus of a newly powerful state. The way of life to which Fontane’s generation had become accustomed was disappearing, and the future was auspicious but uncertain. Fontane was always ambivalent about Berlin. He complained ...”

“... might better be left unexamined. Over large portions, this book is about nothing – or, nothing more than the weekly phut-phut of the English literary establishment. It is a book in which the reader learns how to endure, if never quite outwit, a dark regime of sentences such as ‘One feature for which the Lit Supp has always been famous is its cantankerous ...”

“... very original to say so. The discourse of stereotyping has long been exhausted. Nothing is now more predictable in cultural theory than an aversion to the predictable. It would make for a bolder, more innovative study than this one to put in a good word for stereotypes, even though academics at certain American ...”

“... Castle was transferred to the National Trust in 1951 in lieu of death duties and now receives more than a hundred thousand visitors a year. In 2011 the North Wales Jamaica Society was established to trace links such as these, to establish shared histories and offer modest material redress in the hope of repairing some of the harm done.Colonial Countryside ...”

“... again until the arrival of the Lionesses a hundred years later. The ban lasted until 1971 and more or less extinguished women’s football in Britain for generations, while in Sweden, Germany and the US the women’s game continued to flourish.In other sports, women sneaked through, or under, the sex barrier. In tennis, for example, the first ...”

“... words), whatever the subsequent reports of her deathbed piety and preparedness. The playwright Thomas Dekker described the news of her death as landing ‘like a thunderclap’ among her stunned subjects, who ‘never understood what that strange outlandish word Change signified’.Having ‘studied the Tudors for decades’, Doran tells us that she ...”

“... yet with an intense analytical focus. Among current practitioners of the social sciences only Thomas Schelling and Amos Tversky come to mind as demonstrating to the same extent Hirschman’s quality of controlled imagination. Yet Hirschman is not a part of the social-science establishment. This has nothing to do with his European origins. Many of the ...”

“... Soul selects her own Society – Then – shuts the Door – To her divine Majority – Present no more – (#409) You would search English poetry in vain for lines as anti-democratic as this. The leisured exercise of choice (which is power), the arrogant assumption of desirability, the aristocrat’s knack of taking for granted that the world will beat a ...”

“... ivy and the amethyst – supposed preventives against the effect of wine.’ There is a good deal more of this. The various episodes contain reminiscences of Petronius, Juvenal, Plautus and other writers; but neither the dialogue nor the behaviour of the characters suggests a Roman atmosphere. The characters frequently exclaim ‘Tush’ or ‘Fie’; they ...”

“... modern society.’ Germany after its defeat in 1918 was a very political place. But Scheler, like Thomas Mann, whose Considerations of an Unpolitical Man caught the mood of many intellectuals in the Weimar years, hated the fact. He despised the interest-mongering in the new parties, disliked the interests themselves, and was contemptuous of the ...”

“... fleeing Greek scholars, and in Florence in 1474 it became the first book to be printed in Greek, more than a decade before the Iliad and the Odyssey. It soon started circulating in Latin translation as an excellent introductory text for the burgeoning Philhellenes of the Renaissance.Now comes a new translation in rhyming iambic pentameter by ...”

“... Mary is wilful and impulsive; in Throckmorton’s reports back to England, she is smarter and more capable. Sometimes Throckmorton lays it on thick: when he wants to rebuke Elizabeth for not deferring to her counsellors, he overpraises her cousin, who ‘thinketh herself not too wise, but is content to be ruled by good counsel and wise men (which is a ...”

“... a well-known establishment in Nairobi. But to discover that the Courtney is in Selous Avenue is more of a jolt It’s over a decade since Mugabe and his guerrillas in effect won the war to liberate Zimbabwe, but its capital’s street names are a bizarre mélange. North of Selous the next avenue is Livingstone; then comes Herbert Chitepo, named after an ...”