“... troubling – but the scholarly world is large and leaky, so this policing of the borders didn’t matter very much. Oxford and Cambridge remained strong in many fields, and if they shunned sociology, it thrived at the new universities and the American behemoths of Wisconsin, Michigan and Chicago. If political philosophy wasn’t a main focus at ...”

“... that his story shall have no point beyond itself, it is natural that he should at the end turn to Herbert Butterfield’s essay The Whig Interpretation of History. Butterfield’s subject in 1931 was particular, even parochial. He disliked the liberal triumphalism of much of what he read. But put into the lower case and generalised, his argument can be ...”

“... of fashion. Shakespeare would have thought of the rewrite as ‘a pretty specialised assignment, a matter, indeed, of trying to satisfy audiences who demanded a Revenge play and then laughed when it was provided’. Still, he carried on.I think he did not see how to resolve this problem at the committee meeting, when the agile Bard was voted to carry the ...”

“... had narrow interests and commerce that arts graduates were innumerate. Not even to refer to this matter is curious. The Robbins Report in 1963, says Brooke, ‘spoke harsh things to Oxford and Cambridge and told them to set their house in order’. He does not say why. One reason was that they resisted requests to integrate themselves into a system of higher ...”

“... for Europe. His America is a country without persons – not one is introduced – and for that matter without people, these having been absorbed into his theories of hyperreality and simulation. Seventeen thousand runners in the New York Marathon move him to tears because, ‘collectively, they might seem to be bringing the message of catastrophe for the ...”

“... They had married earlier in the year and decided on a honeymoon in Europe. In Catalonia, a matter of weeks after Franco’s military uprising against the Second Spanish Republic, they settled happily into a political climate of intrigue and rivalry among the variegated species of anti-Fascists who failed, in the end, to hold the pass: bourgeois ...”

“... America, where his book has been the focus of much attention. In April 1897 his great-grandfather Herbert Bentwich sailed for Jaffa, leading a delegation of 21 Zionists who were investigating whether Palestine would make a suitable site for a Jewish national home. Theodor Herzl, whose pamphlet The Jewish State had been published the year before, had never ...”

“... book was noticed. But it also has more solid virtues. After the extended badinage of the prefatory matter, the actual travelogue is delivered in a direct, unfussy style. Jonson hits the right note when he calls Coryate a ‘bold carpenter of words’. Much of the text is practical, indeed statistical (journey times, populations, dimensions of notable ...”

“... dilemma emerges: how not to destroy the other or others whom I need in order to live. It isn’t a matter of calculating that destroying them would probably be a bad idea. Rather, it is a matter of recognising that dependency fundamentally defines us: it is something I never quite outgrow, no ...”

“... water jugs upset etc etc has a very small charm.’ The guest responsible for all the mischief was Herbert Gladstone, son of the prime minister, then aged 28 and already Liberal MP for Leeds, a future home secretary and the first governor general of South Africa. The Souls formed themselves in opposition to silliness of this sort, but also to the greater ...”

“... refer to a backdrop of stories. Jones’s wife, we discover, left him for someone called Jones (Herbert); and 11 years after Jones first proposed making his name more opulent Freud was to write to him of someone Jones had enquired about: ‘He may be called Freud; the name is not as rare as one might wish.’ Rarer, though, than Jones. If one of the ...”

“... be reanimated in Anglican form in the great phase of Christian writing that spanned Donne himself, Herbert and Vaughan, Milton and Marvell; in each of the three centuries that followed, there emerged in England a different religious poetry, orthodox and unorthodox. But the historians’ negations are helpful, and echo another witticism of Donne’s, this time ...”

“... switched sides or even abstained. All Wilson’s wisest advisers urged him to support a Yes vote. Herbert Hoover told him that the reservations did not ‘imperil the great principles of the League of Nations to prevent war’. Bernard Baruch implored him to accept that ‘half a loaf is better than no bread.’ In any case, a future Democratic Congress could ...”

“... large houses are now getting out of them,’ Country Life noted in 1919. ‘Who goes in is another matter.’ To some extent the magazine was itself the answer, as Tinniswood’s constant recourse to its archives suggests. Established in 1897, the year of Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, its pages mixed traditional country-house interests, hunting, pig breeding ...”

“... by the British. ‘A large quantity of brass castings & carved tusks have been found,’ Captain Herbert Walker noted in his diary. ‘The Admiral & his staff have been very busy “safeguarding” the remainder, so I doubt if there will be much left for smaller fry … The whole camp is strewn with loot.’ Olfert Dapper had referred to the bronzes ...”