“... of the business takes place in London. It is arguable that the development of this market, even more than the Big Bang of 1986, was the vital step that transformed London’s fortunes after the war. The creation of the eurobond market was Warburg’s most significant achievement, but the original source of his rise to fame was the introduction of the ...”

“... to understand his own failures and achievements in relation to his father’s. ‘I have thought more than once that perhaps I embarked on the entire boating enterprise simply to repeat his experience so that I could know him better – perhaps even, in a way, recover him after his death.’ He deliberately descends to the depths. ‘The things I believed ...”

“... the relation between the biography of philosophers, or indeed authors in general, and their work. Thomas Nagel, for instance, has suggested that they have practically nothing to do with one another. Philosophical work is autonomous: it stands on its own feet, and interpretation of it should be based on what it contains. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, on the other ...”

“... to achieve a judicious balance, of the sort that usually wins one enemies all around. It is more than a quarter of a century since Darwin published Britain, Egypt and the Middle East: Imperial Policy in the Aftermath of War, 1918-22 (1981); since then he has edited or co-edited two other works on the last days of the British Empire. After Tamerlane ...”

“... have argued) because print was disguising its own novelty in pursuit of credibility, but more simply because handwritten texts were the only available model. What else could a printed book look like apart from a manuscript book? It is also in all senses a big book, a tome for the lectern rather than the private study. The Royal edition consists of ...”

“... to Ashbery, rivalling the scope of hero-critics like Saintsbury or Curtius or Auerbach though more giddily adventurous than they were. A few years ago he was maintaining that the parts of the Old Testament attributed to J, the Yahwist (that is, the author who refers to God as Yahveh), were written by a woman at the decadent court of Rehoboam. It seems a ...”

“... the difficulty of even the most apparently simple lyrics. Victorian poetry, she contends, ‘asks more demanding and radical questions of its culture than other genres of the period, experimenting with forms and poetic language commensurate with this complexity’. Readers of Armstrong’s book will not always find it possible to distinguish the opacities of ...”

“... pigs, stands the funerary monument of Robert Burton. Already, it will be noticed, I am giving more information than is strictly necessary. My excuse must be that it is a habit I have caught from Burton himself. A schoolboy, asked to produce a review, is said to have written: ‘This book tells me more than I wish to ...”

“... royal twin (Oedipus, King Arthur, Krishna). Wright regards ‘mythologising’ as little more than ‘lying’: separated twins who overdramatise their resemblances, or make up stories in order to get into the press, are ‘mythologising’, a charge supported by the likelihood that ‘the press’ in this instance is the National Enquirer, the ...”

“... proved decisive in the face of a narrow, but clear, national majority for the losing candidate. More recently, the State of California has presented another challenge to the straightforwardness of democracy as the rest of the world imagines it, with the proposal to recall an elected governor in possession of an unambiguous and unexpired democratic ...”

“... but not always with ‘my girlfriend’). Writers, on the other hand, are well known to get more than their fair share of such bounty: it’s one of the things for which the world admires them, and/or envies them, and/or hates their guts. And writers don’t often discuss how it feels to hold such freedom, though travelling, idling, quasi-colonial ...”

“... the Scottish words ‘Loch Shiel’ over and over again. The idea seemed to be that this was more ‘religious’, a small Jerusalem moment. The theology tended towards literalism, but a literalism of the spirit rather than of the word: intelligent evangelicism – the church was in a university town. Nobody believed that Genesis was creation’s ...”

“... it is all dressed up, most real when it’s at its most sham self. The architect and pamphleteer Thomas ‘Victorian’ Harris fretted about the 19th century’s inability to create an architecture peculiar to itself, its age, its engineering, its steam power and its myriad inventions, all the while failing to see that the architecture he craved was being ...”

“... its quizzical severity: que sais-je? Or so we are told. In practice, though, the essay tends to be more or less the precise opposite of such a sober and responsible self-examination. The writers who have used the form in the questioning spirit – the essayists, from Montaigne to Stanley Cavell, who generate a sense that the act of writing is for them a ...”

“... For several years, until he became Labour leader and had to watch his entry more carefully, Neil Kinnock claimed in Who’s Who to be the author of an anthology of the writings and sayings of Aneurin Bevan entitled What Nye said: each year the supposed publication date was authoritatively amended, although the book has never appeared ...”