“... Gypsy curses and bolts of lightning, and no one for a moment can have believed it to be true. ‘I may observe,’ Ainsworth wrote in the preface to the fourth edition (the one I have used), ‘that I have not, as yet, been able to obtain satisfactory evidence that the extraordinary equestrian feat, attributed to him by oral tradition, and detailed in this ...”

“... the active line comes into being. ‘It goes out for a walk, so to speak, aimlessly.’ The camera may appear to survey a terrain. But there is nothing to stop the viewer’s eye going out for a walk along the tracks laid down by the countless overlapping material histories embedded within it.Klee also imagined a different kind of active line: one that is ...”

“... benign atmosphere. He also seems to have a predilection for works on a small scale, which may reflect the common tendency in collectors to favour things in their own image (as God does): Ortiz is a small, alert, dapper man. His taste can be hinted at, perhaps, by a guess at what he might like to have samples of if he collected European ...”

“... What can be done with a people that produces 246 different cheeses? General De Gaulle’s remark may be apocryphal – France has far more than 246 cheeses – but it captures a central dilemma in French history. How could such a diverse collection of peoples be forged into a single nation? The question remains pertinent ...”

“... between ancient and modern in Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) and Rewards and Fairies (1910) may owe something to the stinking Lanchester: or, rather, to the idée fixe of velocity it embodied. In October 1901, in a letter full of warm and discerning praise for Kim (1901), James had advised Kipling to ‘chuck public affairs, which are an ignoble ...”

“... otherwise have been allowed to join the Union. I didn’t mind the question, though. Mormons may no longer be subject to extermination in Missouri (that legislation was rescinded in 1976), but the eleven million Latter-Day Saints – a little under half live in the US – are generally thought to be peculiar, when they are thought of at all. The Church ...”

“... millennium in which the championship was a two-horse race – and a very close race, so that there may never be a consensus lasting more than fifty years as to which of them was the winner. Nevertheless, there is a clear distinction in their greatness, one relating purely to its nature, not its degree. It’s that Matisse did not possess or need to possess ...”

“... miscellaneous essays by MacCarthy, all of which have been collected before, and a memoir by Lord David Cecil, of which a portion appeared as preface to an earlier selection. Desmond MacCarthy was probably the best-known London literary journalist of his time, and it is clearly the view of publisher and editor that his influence can be extended into our ...”

“... in Parliament it has triumphed over the odds, largely thanks to bloody-minded commando raids by David Owen, who has been the one politician consistently able to score off Thatcher. In the opinion polls it has been back at the levels of the General Election campaign. Moreover, whenever there has been a real election, the Alliance has beaten the polls in a ...”

“... it is for us to examine – as the genuine diary, covering the years 1930 to 1939, of a certain David Peterley, scion of an ancient landed family. Peterley’s diary and other papers, so ran the Foreword by its ‘editor’ Richard Pennington, occupy a large red box in the McGill University Library, of which Pennington was the chief librarian, and the diary ...”

“... of his old boss. Thatcherism was always an aberration from the norm of advanced capitalism. Major may not know how to get back to the mainstream but I shall be astonished if he does not try. On the left, Bennite siege socialism and even Bevanite Clause Four utopianism have disappeared without trace. Labour is now a social-democratic party, committed to a ...”

“... He had earlier conveyed similar messages: ‘Mubarak must go’ and ‘Gaddafi must go.’ Obama may have entertained the idea that he was playing a benign role in the Arab Spring – showing himself ‘on the right side of history’, as he likes to say. ‘Assad must go’ also sounded as if he was channelling the spirit of George W. Bush; but that ...”

“... had been ‘brainwashed’ into believing in the dangers of climate change. Thiel then tried David Gelernter, an anti-PC warrior and author of America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture (and Ushered in the Obamacrats). Thiel tried to pitch Gelernter to Trump as a martyr for technology, because in 1993 he had been one of the victims of the ...”

“... It may be an accident of rereading that makes me want to put James Baldwin’s essays and novels together, to see The Fire Next Time and Giovanni’s Room, for example, as versions of each other. But the matched books do make interesting sense: more thoughtful sense, perhaps, than the already powerful separate stories ...”

“... to clear up. The same could be said of Rudd’s legacy to the Australian Labor Party. Narcissism may be a self-referential condition, but it ensnares an awful lot of people in its sticky ...”