“... new buildings and maze of yards, was a paradise for wanderers. With some relish, Haslam claims Thomas De Quincey as a prototype local raver: ‘He would get dosed up on Tuesdays and Saturdays and go out listening to music, carrying with him at all times “portable ecstasies”, tinctures of laudanum.’ Every time he passed a cotton mill on the city ...”

“... method. They might well have been subtitled ‘Reconsiderations’, a point which emerges more clearly if they are read, not in the order in which they are printed here, but in the order in which they were published. The earliest, which came out in 1971, is called simply ‘Prosopography’, and deals with the intellectual roots, the value and the ...”

“... Looking back over more than fifty years of publishing, I count myself lucky to have begun by working for Constant Huntington, chairman of Putnam, a Bostonian of soldierly appearance, blessed with an air of extraordinary propriety, but a man of paradox. He was a self-confessed snob who enjoyed moving in what he called ‘the great world’, by which he meant the narrow orbit of country houses and fashionable quasi-literary circles where he believed the best writers were to be met ...”

“... ahead is fairly humdrum.’ Nothing could be further from the truth: although the outcome is no more in doubt than that of a Classical tragedy – the final chapter is written not by Costantini but by Amnesty International – the skill and compassion with which Francisco Sanctis’s lonely battle with himself is described, and the evocation of the ...”

“... was erratic, dependent on the variable enthusiasm of individuals such as Carnot, Hoche and Bruix. More important, France under the Directory was barely a revolutionary polity. Driven by force of circumstance, it was descending from idealistic internationalism into chauvinistic imperialism. The hostility of the other great powers, culminating in the Second ...”

“... an attractive option for young men who didn’t have the connections to establish themselves in more traditional professions, or who had damaged their reputations early and were looking for a way out or a second chance). The vast growth of the British army during the Napoleonic Wars – and its high attrition rates – made room for hundreds of new ...”

“... fires of hell’. The Church frowns on masturbation, but the code of Mexican machismo is more permissive, even allowing for deviations from heterosexuality: a limited range of acts is licensed for men clearly labelled as gay and inferior. It turns out these acts are not only convenient but addictive.The police beat up suspects as a matter of ...”

“... a contraction not just of time, the daylight hours, but of possibility. Everything grows more chromatic: the late sunshine, the shop windows, the cars. And then evening arrives like an orange rolling off a table.’ Or this. Someone who may or may not be Specktor is on a date with Q, a television writer:We sat for three and a half hours, after which ...”

“... Shakespeare’s defining knacks, so it’s said, is his ability to render his own time and place more or less irrelevant to the appreciation of his art. So although it seemed uncontroversial when Paul Salzman recently related a rich and miscellaneous clutch of Jacobean publications (Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Donne’s elegies, Wroth’s Urania and ...”

“... contemporaries, between great thinkers and lesser fry, political thought was reckoned to be a more elevated – if stilted – affair, of giant responding unto giant, sometimes across centuries of silence. Its history belonged not to historians but to philosophers; and political scientists, broadly speaking, concurred. They too studied political thought ...”

“... Elfriede Jelinek’s​ eleven novels and more than twenty plays have few plausible characters and even fewer parsable plots. When she was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2004, the committee praised ‘her musical flow of voices and counter-voices’, which ‘reveal the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating power ...”

“... give way to a less appalled reaction: ‘Elaine just said she was surprised it didn’t happen more often … I mean … it’s something to do.’Murray was born in Dublin in 1975, and his work explores the struggle, as one of his characters puts it, between ‘the quote-unquote “new” Ireland, the Ireland of technology and communication and gender ...”

“... first approach was pioneered by a number of Marxist scholars. Marxism has always been drawn to the more active phases of history, and its volcanic eruptions, the moments of revolution. But most of history has been far more static, even regressive, for reasons among which human nature must rank high, or what Peter Clarke in a ...”

“... wonderful fertility. At this point Warner turns to historical context, listing the bill of fare at Thomas Coram’s Foundling Hospital – lots of gruel, porridge and potatoes – but the Gingerbread House which traps Hansel and Gretel seems to have deeper roots in the imagination than hunger and a dull diet. It belongs to the same imaginative zone as the ...”

“... over five years – while the first volume deals with nine. Cosima now knew Wagner better and felt more (though never totally) confident in handling her new husband; her guilt at abandoning Von Bülow grew blunter. As a consequence, her observations are more revealing. In the first volume the composition of the last act of ...”