“... for them with schools. It does not fully deal with the cultural claims of the myth. Children took two years or more to learn to read and would come to writing skill only as a subsequent supplement. The Kirk urged parents to put their children to school to learn to read: it did not expect more. Prestige certainly attached to writing skill, if it could be ...”

“... He was definitively despatched by Gore Vidal some long while ago. Conor Cruise O’Brien then took his furious turn at the coconut shy. And here is Hitchens, lobbing adjectives like grenades in the same cause. It’s all too much. One can’t easily imagine anyone wasting so much ink and anger over, say, Bernard Levin – Britain’s answer to ...”

“... there were more police up from Scotland Yard to see her: Detective Inspector Moffatt, for one, who took her to the Police Training College for an interview which lasted most of the day. She told Mr Moffatt that she was a member of the IRA, and used to carry guns from Dublin to Belfast. She said she had taken explosives up from London to Manchester for the M62 ...”

“... that duty in drastically different ways. Alexis’s intellectual path was strikingly his own. It took him some time to find it. Family connections secured him an (unpaid) post of juge auditeur – a junior magistrate – at Versailles, but he had no particular aptitude for the work, and had not attained a salaried position by the time he left for good in ...”

“... Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington, author of After Reason and The Female Woman, took up the task of writing about Picasso because she had been ‘seduced by his magnetism, his intensity, that mysterious quality of inexhaustibility bursting forth from the transfixing stare of his black marble eyes as much as from his work’, but had come to be ‘chilled’ by him ...”

“... Convention was a glamorous performance. But at one point, trying to reproach the Democrats with John Adams’s phrase ‘Facts are stubborn things,’ he slipped and declared instead: ‘Facts are stupid things.’ At the moment he wished to invoke an intransigent, incontrovertible reality which would supposedly confound his enemies and bear out the ...”

“... style’, and whole new lines of children’s toys appeared glor-ifying the Boers and ridiculing John Bull. Even the pacifist Tolstoy was caught up in the wild enthusiasm for the war: ‘You know what point I’ve reached? Opening a paper every morning I passionately wish to read that the Boers have beaten the British.’ He knew that he ‘should not ...”

“... were Angles, or other Germanic peoples, and they created a chaotic patchwork of statelets which took half a millennium to evolve into larger political and cultural units. This did not have to happen. It wasn’t inevitable. But about two hundred years later, after countless battles, marriages, mergers and chance occurrences, a dozen rival kingdoms ...”

“... The modern scholarly literature on the history of witch beliefs and witch trials, however, first took shape in opposition to Margaret Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921), which claimed that Renaissance witches were worshippers of pagan gods. It has therefore been resolutely agnostic about the existence of actual witches in the period of the ...”

“... the whole story from Mesmer’s first experiments in the 18th century to the developments that took place from the late 19th century onwards. She focuses on the 1830s and 1840s, the last pre-Darwinian decades, when there was an intense revival of interest in mesmerism through all classes of society. It was, as she says, quite a democratic interest, not ...”

“... return to later. The first volume of the biography, Pottle’s James Boswell: The Earlier Years, took him up to his marriage and the age of 30. The pattern of his life – and its central indecision, which was never to be resolved – had already been laid down. At one end of the still only precariously united kingdom, Boswell played the parts of an ...”

“... occupying a hundred pages, exactly a third of the book, the texts of 16 programmes Orwell wrote or took part in. Like a surprised prospector who has accidentally struck gold on terrain declared worthless by geologists, West exaggerates the size of his claim and the value of his ore. Literary criticism is not his strong suit, and I would not rate him highly as ...”

“... more representative of the tergiversation of the times than at first appears. Oxford in the 1840s took the double strain of the combat between the Evangelical tradition and Anglo-Catholicism and the invasion of what Newman saw as the real nightmare enemy – intellectual liberalism or ‘the wild, living intellect of man’ torn free from institutional ...”

“... subject-matter, with a style which paid close attention to the detail of natural appearances and took themes of an aesthetically and morally elevated sort – is clear enough. The results evoke responses which are nothing like as simple. From the first the Pre-Raphaelites were able to rouse both anger and admiration; a Soho sex shop with Burne-Jones posters ...”

“... the water. Homes were burnt down. Prisoners were lined up on the bank of a ditch and shot. I took the book with me to Mogadishu, Somalia, and found that reading a chapter of summary soldiering in My Lai was a busman’s holiday after a day of anarchy and gunfire. Four Hours in My Lai is distinctly putdownable, by which I intend only praise. It argues ...”