“... None of them in doing this lost a craftsmanlike pleasure in things well and carefully made. That may be why it is almost as easy to relate the look of both Nicholson’s and Pasmore’s paintings to pots made in England (the texture of those by Bernard Leach or Michael Cardew, the sgraffito on those by Lucie Rie) as to the work of European artists such as ...”

“... there are ecstatic births, orgasmic births, traumatic births, and what would be traumatic for one may not be for another. How we make sense of such experiences has always depended on the contingencies of biology as well as those of time and place, gender, class and race.For those in industrialised countries where reproductive care is more readily – if by no ...”

“... questions, have only recently begun to be studied in detail, despite the fact that all of these may have far-reaching consequences for the nature of the OED documentation and, of course, for any conclusions based upon it. Schäfer chooses to examine just one aspect of OED policy: the accuracy of the dates given for the first use of a word. He reread a ...”

“... slip the content straight down the reader’s throat, for content is what matters most. This may beg a lot more questions, but except to critics it is clear enough. When W.H. Davies says he saw the wind dragging the corn by her golden hair into a dark wood, the startling and exciting information goes straight inside us. Complex reactions then ...”

“... phrase, yet it is telling enough when you consider how one person, out of a mass of others, may become suddenly vivid through an accident of acquaintance or perception. Nussbaum does not cite Mead on this useful point. She tries to recruit help further afield, from Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. The name of Smith is cunningly brought in, and ...”

“... thereanent.’ Lear’s nonsense is full of mistakes that both the characters and their creator may or may not want to make, and Jenny Uglow’s absorbing new biography brings to the fore the question of the relation of his creativity to the accidence of his experience. In his diaries Lear often quotes or invokes his ...”

“... the writer’s struggles is accompanied by indifference to the reader’s – an indifference that may border on hostility. Armand’s son, present from the beginning of the book, is given a name only on its penultimate page, as if to advertise the arbitrariness of its previous omission and to reveal something that became detectable rather earlier – an ...”

“... of all parts of the sea is linked. What happens to a diatom in the upper, sunlit strata of the sea may well determine what happens to a cod lying on the ledge of some rocky canyon a hundred fathoms below, or to a bed of multicoloured, gorgeously plumed sea worms carpeting an underlying shoal, or to a prawn creeping over the soft oozes of the sea floor in the ...”

“... in the majority of cases. Talk of ‘default’ mistakes the nature of the loans: graduates may eventually have their balances cleared by the government, but that doesn’t mean they have defaulted on the terms of repayment. The initial estimate was that fewer than 40 per cent of borrowers were expected to clear their accounts. The IFS now estimates ...”

“... In the chapter in The Prince on the savage Syracusan tyrant Agathocles, he says that cruelty may be well or ill matched to its end, ‘se del male è licito dire bene’ – if it’s OK to talk ‘well’ of evil. Macaulay thought that the Pistola manuscript, a morbid account in Machiavelli’s hand of the Florentine plague of 1523, could not have been ...”

“... on paleographic grounds this is assigned to the seventh or eighth century. The cross itself may be older – not as old as St Thomas, as the relics claim to be, but very beautiful and austere. What this unexpected extension of the Thomas story produced in me was not any access of religious feeling but an intense biographical curiosity. His Indian ...”

“... word about a body of work that he had stuffed with deliberate discrepancies. On the other hand, he may have been aiming to have the last laugh. ‘People understand me so little,’ he said in one of the notebooks, ‘that they fail even to understand my complaints that they do not understand me’. In another note Kierkegaard explained that ‘after my death ...”

“... for the Performing Arts and the New York Historical Society. Long fascinated by the events of 10 May 1849, I couldn’t leave Manhattan without making a pilgrimage to Astor Place. But I could find no memorial to the 26 people killed in one of New York’s bloodiest episodes; nor was there any mention of the two actors, the American Edwin Forrest and the ...”

“... because the word connotes anachronistic misogyny. This girl – sorry, woman – is sexist, you may have thought as soon as you saw my usage. Well, I’m not. These critics aren’t hysterical because they have uncontrollable, misunderstood responses to social problems; they perform hysteria because they know their audience respects the existence of those ...”

“... the falling Oscar distributed upon them, they would have remained in obscurity. Brian Roberts may well have stumbled upon them by accident. Four of his previous biographies have been set, wholly or partly, in Africa; perhaps it was while he was examining the records of Zululand in 1881 that he came across a most improbable figure, Lady Florence Dixie, a ...”