“... Adorno’s own ‘damaged life’ as he called it, they are imbued with the theoretical arguments more rigorously developed in other works, such as Dialectic of Enlightenment, Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory. Even to those familiar with these demanding studies, Adorno’s virtuosity in marshalling their arguments in the analysis of literary texts ...”

“... and intellectual Dissenters. He dislikes certain strains in Anglicanism. He states baldly that Thomas Ken’s ‘Evening Hymn’ is ‘very indifferent writing’, and he presumes that quoting the poem in its entirety will prove his point. It does not. Davie is disingenuous when he argues that because Ken’s ‘Evening Hymn’ is sung in abbreviated form ...”

“... was almost unreachable. Not that he’d written many book reviews lately. His literary papers were more a habit, his one luxury. He often told me how, in some far-flung place, wearying of the jabber of an alien culture, he would retreat to a quiet corner and ‘tune in’ to more rarefied conversation. I saw him do this ...”

“... his account of how savagely the regicides were treated by comparison with the king. For it is more than a political scientist’s conceit that the English Civil War, like the American one, is not yet over. In 1967, when the High Court for the first time asserted a measure of judicial control over the exercise by ministers of the prerogative power of the ...”

“... from bouts of fever that were almost certainly malarial. Some years after Cromwell’s death, Thomas Sydenham, the physician who first described scarlet fever, and whose description of an acute attack of gout was still being recommended to medical students 250 years later, openly advocated the use of the bark; but it was Charles II’s recurrent malaria ...”

“... at 1990 prices, crude had gone from $4.50 a barrel in 1970 to nearly $25 in 1973, had reached more than $45 in 1979, and was back to about $10. It was the wildest fluctuation since production had begun in Pennsylvania in the 1860s. Yergin sets out to tell the entire story: more exactly, to tell the story as it might he ...”

“... to ‘make artificiall lightning in their heavens’. At times the play seemed to generate a power more than dramatic. At one performance in Shoreditch the wooden walls of the theatre suddenly ‘crackt’ and ‘frighted the audience.’ At another, in Exeter, the players stopped dead in the middle of the conjuration scene, ‘for they were all perswaded ...”

“... Arctic exploration for four decades – of humble stock and attracted to persons, like Parry, more to the manor born, stubborn in defending his own often wrong ideas, high-handed in his use of power. And there is William Scoresby, a whaling captain and brilliant amateur scientist who knew more about the Arctic than all ...”

“... becoming part of history. One wonders to what use Bataille’s work will be put as it becomes more widely available in English, especially in the haphazard form its availability is taking. He was a fragmentary writer, but his many works are all chips off the same block – or, to use a more Bataillean image, fluids ...”

“... Throughout it manifests a breadth of reading and depth of erudition of formidable extent. What is more important still is that it must, if Aarsleff is right, radically alter our understanding of the intellectual history of modern linguistics. And that means our grasp of the world of ideas in which we live. Few will disagree with Aarsleff that the history of ...”

“... the Second World War. Suspecting that Attlee had been underrated, he embarked on a biography. The more he discovered of that enigmatic character, the more favourable the opinion he formed of him. The thesis running through his book is that Attlee was a great and good influence in the affairs both of his party and of his ...”

“... bestowing only brief attention, and most of that negative, on anything currently going on. He is more likely to cite a colleague for achieving a howler than an insight, and indeed much of the fun to be had from reading Ricks derives from his favourite pursuit of spot-checking his colleagues’ work for mistakes. In this book perhaps a score of scholars are ...”

“... subaltern talking about Buck House, or your father-in-law telling you how his new golf clubs cost more but aren’t as good as his old ones. Other people are Hell (I have never seen why Sartre should have been praised for inverting and falsifying this truism), and the self-important spongers of Venice no more so than the ...”

“... illustrious wisdom of the Great Cham. This case was most damagingly pressed in the 19th century by Thomas Babington Macaulay, who saw Boswell as a wine-bibbing, plate-licking reprobate, the very smallest of men, who somehow wrote a great biography by accident. This view has been corrected somewhat by the serial publication of Boswell’s private papers, which ...”

“... inequality like Stephan Thernstrom, advocates of a social-anthropological approach such as Keith Thomas, partisans of a politically committed history of everyday life like Raphael Samuel and the History Workshop, and more besides. The world of history seemed then to be not just expanding but exploding, into areas undreamed ...”