“... In 1834 a spectacular fire destroyed the House of Commons. No one was sorry. More than 60 years later Gladstone still remembered the building’s lack of ‘corporeal conveniences’: there was nowhere even for ‘washing the hands’. The latest volumes of The History of Parliament confirm the slumminess of late Georgian Westminster ...”

“... can befall anyone in a Henry James novel, and all he thinks about is his neighbour’s legacy, or more precisely ‘what old Frank would have done with the fruits of his swindle, on the occasion of the rupture that had kept them apart in hate and vituperation for so many years’. It’s a great beginning, but what we have of the completed novel is only ...”

“... third full biography of A.J.P. Taylor to appear since his death in 1990. I find this fact almost more interesting than anything in the biographies themselves. For more than two decades after the war Taylor was, very nearly, the public face of the historical profession in Britain, delivering his pugnacious, often ...”

“... stood in front of Tintoretto’s Crucifixion in the side room upstairs, I wondered if my eyes were more alert than usual because of the early hour. The different tones in the huge painting seemed incredibly clear. I could trace varying shades of pink, each one catching the light in a different way, or note the yellow tunic of the figure I supposed to be St ...”

“... rooms miraculously transformed into gallery spaces. Finally, a particularly eccentric outpost, Thomas Hirschhorn’s plywood and packing tape temple in honour of Georges Bataille, was erected in the middle of a low-income housing project.Documenta, whose original mission had been to celebrate Germany’s new postwar identity and the transnational role of ...”

“... subdue to itself, whatever it received into its bosom; and in no language has this confidence been more fully justified by the result.’ Shame and anxiety over the gallimaufry that is the English lexicon was replaced with triumphalism and self-congratulation: so it remains today. It’s no secret that modern English is saturated with French. Insults and ...”

“... and reality is under assault. The photographing of children in the nude is often prosecuted more vigorously than actual child abuse. The media and the academy waste endless hours debating the morality of politically correct language, while the economic inequality suffered by minorities remains unaffected. ‘Rap music is really rape music,’ say some ...”

“... Creation to the 4004th year before Christ, and Noah’s flood to the 2349th. And five years later Thomas Stanley published a thorough revision of Diogenes Laertius entitled The History of Philosophy, revealing that he too was a date-freak. He moaned tetchily about traditional ‘anachronisms’, such as Diogenes’ alleged ‘anachronism of one year’ in ...”

“... a Bus, Ship, Rail and Air Travel Guide. The travel guide, his Urfaust, is the progenitor of ever more fantastic and unpublishable compendia, sketches for an ultimate timetable in which travel data would unlock the doors to all human knowledge. Scham’s Utopian travel encyclopedia, which owes less to Bradshaw than to Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pècuchet, is ...”

“... long, elegant fingers that were always flying upward) to hide a beautiful gap-toothed smile. (Thomas Victor’s photograph, reproduced on the dust-jacket of the Collected, catches the smile convincingly.) Salter also fills in, for Clampitt’s new readers, the moral background to the poems. It was Quakers who had settled New Providence, but a ...”

“... she writes some funny passages about his frustrated political ambitions in Washington, and an even more entertaining satire of her egocentric and capricious mistress, especially of an incident in which cosmetic powder turns the woman’s face black and leads to her being mistaken for a Negro. The humiliated family retreats from Washington to North ...”

“... was carefully trained in the art of letter writing. His bedroom, according to his early biographer Thomas Moffet, ‘overflowed with elegant epistles’ which he had painstakingly written. The opening letter in Roger Kuin’s superb new edition of his correspondence, addressed to the 12-year-old Philip by his father, Sir Henry, urges him ‘to exercise that ...”

“... might have been called Christianity in the East – with reference to John Bossy’s brilliant and more wide-ranging anatomy of late medieval religion, Christianity in the West (1985). The Stripping of the Altars was one of those rare books which have the power radically to alter our understanding of a large piece of the past. When A.G. Dickens published The ...”

“... filmmakers. The novelist Cesare Pavese went so far as to compare De Sica, perhaps ironically, with Thomas Mann, as the author of a national narrative. Had movies superseded literature? The Futurists thought so, proposing in one 1916 manifesto a cinema that would ‘co-operate in the general renewal, taking the place of the literary review (always pedantic) and ...”

“... of rapidly diminishing respectability. His father was a whisky salesman who drank a good deal more than he ever managed to sell. When things got especially bad, Sinclair’s mother would seek refuge in the home of her own father, who was secretary-treasurer of the Western Maryland Railroad, or that of her sister, who was married to one of the richest men ...”