“... of Ireland in the 18th Century, but it will find the proximity of works of its own century much more uneasy company. Not only does the title invite endless tutorial discussions on why this particular period should be singled out as the ‘Age of Imperialism and Revolution’, but the meaning of ‘Ireland’ as here discussed opens up a Pandora’s box of ...”

“... is that it is simultaneously political and cultural. This is a mode of argument, but perhaps even more of assumption, which has often seemed alien and unacceptable east of Offa’s Dyke, though its relevance to the English experience can be shown to be just as direct. Within Wales, the two truths, or those versions of them which are reciprocally dismissed as ...”

“... work fulfilled the demands of the moment. The closer any particular past development is to us, the more difficult it is to maintain this historicist commitment to the self-containment of the past: art historians continue to cordon off the early Symbolist Mondrian and the naturalist who continued to paint flowers all his life from the properly Modernist artist ...”

“... leaders and intellectuals, including Stalin, Einstein, Henry Ford, Mussolini, Fritz Kreisler, Thomas Mann, John Dos Passos, H.L. Mencken, Anatole France, H.G. Wells, the dean of Harvard Law School, Roscoe Pound and 205 members of the law school’s 1927 graduating class. Interest in the case did not die with the men’s executions. It has been the subject ...”

“... and high-quality decision-making. No matter, as the authors of an article entitled ‘Who is (more) rational?’, published in the American Economic Review in 2014, cheerfully conclude: ‘Decision-making ability, unlike preferences, may be justifiably manipulated.’ Just give the poor a bit of a nudge, and they’ll shape up.That was then. And as we ...”

“... for his fellow alters, since the narrator, at this point, hasn’t been ‘called out’ – a more sensible psychotherapist soon turns up, and treatment proceeds without reference to extraterrestrials. However, sceptics would retort that MPD therapists’ reliance on recovered memories is no less faith-based than a belief in past-life ...”

“... purpose: ‘to make demonstrations on behalf of the natural order’. He also painted subjects more usually associated with botanical artists since the 17th century. Tulips, fritillaries and auriculas throng the Driehaus Museum in this last leg of A New Perspective on Nature’s American tour (until 17 August). McEwen was respectful of the tradition of ...”

“... a genius like Flaubert: doesn’t this also mean we’d like to cut him down to size? Is there not more vanity involved in putting a ‘good question’ than there can ever be in providing a sound answer? And if there is a sound answer, can the question really have been all that good? These are the circles that Barnes’s people tend to move in, round and ...”

“... home of his conquests, doubtless imaginary. (Ferris omits, or perhaps never came across, a much more interesting claim belonging to this sojourn: Wheldon once told me that he had been allowed to join the local Hitler Youth.) As a student at LSE, then in a variety of jobs he didn’t suit, finally in the Army – where he got on famously – he had a number ...”

“... The only other really appealing possibility was a monomaniacal plan of the Victorian architect, Thomas Willson, who in 1842 designed a brick and granite sepulchral pyramid with a base area the size of Russell Square to be built on Primrose Hill. Its 94 levels (topped by an observatory) would be ‘sufficiently capacious to receive five millions of the ...”

“... Arabesques is not an autobiography, a straightforward life, at all, but something far sneakier and more complicated: a counterlife, with fiction and fact constantly ducking and weaving around each other. As in Philip Roth’s novel of that name, moments that look like intimate revelations are shown to be virtuoso displays of formalist trickery, and vice ...”

“... history, if by the truth we mean correspondence with empirical reality. The authors of the more lurid travellers’ tales would have been taken aback if someone had described them in modern vernacular as ‘bloody liars’, but so they were, many of them. They were telling stories, and wanted to tell good stories. Aristotle’s conception of poetic ...”

“... In March 1932​ , Thomas Mann visited Weimar in central Germany. For the last thirty years of the 18th century, this modestly sized town was home to Goethe, Schiller, Herder and Wieland, but by the 1930s it had become a hotbed of the radical right. ‘The admixture of Hitlerism and Goethe affects one strangely,’ Mann wrote in ‘Meine Goethereise ...”

“... conscientious diligence, now referring rather to the institutions of manufacture; and ‘art’, more narrowly defined as imaginative creation in place of its prior meaning of human skill in general. Arts and crafts were semantically parted, labour understood through its role in manufacture. Not one of the Lunar men appeared in Williams’s pages, though he ...”

“... male on his way to the public house were not, as might be supposed, harpies eager to lure him into more vicious courses. They were Salvationist ‘exhorters’ intent on waking the dull clod to dreams of heaven. In the words of the War Cry, they ‘would arrest his attention, and talk to him, one on one side, and another on the other, thus keeping up a ...”