“... The history of Roman Britain has always been – perhaps predictably – more about Britain than about Rome. For those committed to our island story, the Romans, after all, are something of an embarrassment, as invaders and occupiers who brutally suppressed native independence movements. Even if conquest can be glossed with more comfortable ideas of civilisation, there is still the nagging problem of the Dark Ages: the inability of the British to maintain good order once the legions had been withdrawn ...”

“... John Gray declares that morality is a ‘myth’ obscuring the fact that our existence has ‘no more meaning than the life of a slime mould’. David Brooks, author of the bestselling pop-science Bildungsroman The Social Animal, explains that his fictional everywoman ‘Erica’ is slow to trust ‘Harold’ because ‘while Pleistocene men could pick their ...”

“... an even greater wish to involve the reader in a problem and its solving. It is, he says, a book more about questions than answers. It is certainly full of opinions. Rackham begins by defining and describing woodlands and the way they behave. They are not mere agglomerations of trees that can be planted: plantations can never in centuries truly replicate ...”

“... knowledge to whatever can be put into a useful shape for examinations, drawing-rooms, or the still more pretentious modes of publicity. Some can absorb knowledge, the more tardy must sweat for it. Shakespeare acquired more essential history from Plutarch than most men could from the whole ...”

“... Villiers, first duke of Buckingham, told James VI and I that what they enjoyed together was ‘more affection than between lovers in the best kind’. Lucy Hughes-Hallett wonders, in her biography of Buckingham, if chiefs of staff or special advisers can be understood as favourites, but really there is no modern equivalent. The royal favourite flourished ...”

“... of communicating with foreign states. He failed on both counts, and returned home with nothing more than a letter from the Qianlong emperor, translated to English, filled with grandiose stylings: ‘Our dynasty’s majestic virtue has penetrated unto every country under Heaven, and Kings of all nations have offered their costly tribute by land and sea. As ...”

“... is easily the most significant intellectual in politics these islands ever produced. Infinitely more profound and productive than his nearest 18th-century equivalent, Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, he was also far more prominent in national politics over a much longer span than John Milton or the 3rd Earl of ...”

“... first, Larkin forged ahead, publishing two novels and a book of not-bad poems before Amis had done more than get his stuff into a few little magazines. Since a lot of their co-hating was directed at the premature career success of others, a certain cooling between them might have been expected at this point. But Amis, to his credit, rallied manfully. ‘I am ...”

“... many hours helping lost cyber-souls find digital salvation. In this particular space, there are more than two million contributors a year, with more than forty thousand making more than 36 annual contributions, and about eight hundred making contributions just about all the time. The ...”

“... these days publish a new collection of thirty or forty poems every three or four years; some are more industrious than even that. Paul Durcan’s Going home to Russia, coming two years after The Berlin Wall Café contains 48 poems; Peter Redgrove’s In the Hall of the Saurians, one year after its predecessor, has 34; Norman MacCaig’s Voice-over, three ...”

“... at once. In this sense, radical politics demand a strangely hybrid human being, one who is both more sceptical and more trustful than the average. Such characters are more gloomy in their view of the past and present than most conservatives, but also ...”

“... could have satisfied, which is why he needed a picture factory and why his collaborators became more or less inspired extensions of his own hand. Van Dyck began his career by learning to be someone else. Sometimes such teamwork is visible, and jars. When Rubens has done the flesh and someone else the fruit, the different ways of showing bloom and shine may ...”

“... leaps, arriving for instance at Eliot’s thoughts on farming via the pottery of Bernard Leach and Thomas Hennell’s 1939 drawings of discarded scythes and harrows for H.J. Massingham’s Country Relics. These are threaded together by a historian’s fascination with how the past conceived its own past. How did 1930s sensibilities, from John Betjeman to Cecil ...”

“... Everyone knows this notion of classlessness is false, since nothing stimulates petty snobberies more immediately than a garden. If you have the wrong sort of paving, or if you put swathes of purple and orange together in the misguided belief that you are the new Gertrude Jekyll, you can be sure your friends will snigger about it on the way home. And if you ...”

“... part of his induction into the circle) Phibbs and Graves’s wife decided they would rather be a more orthodox duo than part of the ménage. At this, Riding – described by Allen Tate as ‘the maddest woman’ – flipped. When the four of them met to talk things through in April 1929 she threatened suicide unless Phibbs returned to them. Phibbs called her ...”