“... speculations. A contemporary explained: ‘In engraving and its operation the process of thought may be carried on with that of the work, and neither be retarded in its progress, by one who is master of his subject in either way. Hence the wild and fanciful theories that emanate from a well stored and imaginative mind.’ Because Blake made his living ...”

“... the amount of attention that has been lavished on the Napoleonic period in its many aspects, it may seem strange that a full life of Field-Marshal Prince Barclay de Tolly has not appeared before now: but it is not difficult to suggest reasons for this. Barclay had a rather dour and in some ways unattractive personality. He had little of the panache of his ...”

“... such grounding, no such principle of invisibility, can be found in Dickens. I am assuming that it may be all right to talk of classes with reference to the work of writers who did not themselves do so. Backward-ranging comparisons, and a risk of anachronism, are likely to enter into an experience of Peter Taylor’s fine stories, for his is an art which makes ...”

“... The British and the Japanese may not be particularly alike, but the two races are exceedingly comparable. The British must actually believe this, for why else would they be displaying such a curious desperation to deny it? No doubt, they sense that to look at Japanese culture too closely would threaten a long-cherished complacency about their own ...”

“... acknowledgement that Dublin has no executive power, and at the same time some apprehension that it may have assumed some measure of political responsibility, in a situation which could explode at any moment. The Unionists are patently clearing the decks for action, but for precisely what kind of action is unclear, perhaps even to themselves. In essence, what ...”

“... in books about composers – for human interest is easily assimilated by the non-musician. It may be considered more useful than German (and hence American) scholarship, but it can hardly be denied that it does not make for good historical writing. The Cambridge Music Guide is an obvious offshoot of the English school, and a rather old-fashioned example ...”

“... friend and Nevill Mott was another near-contemporary. Now that they are both about eighty, they may feel able to risk his posthumous scorn. Mott is a sort of father-in-science to me, and Peierls an uncle. Yet it never occurred to me, until I read these memoirs, how very alike their careers have been. They both grew up into theoretical physics just after the ...”

“... a yawn by the relatively small number of people who are looking for poetry, whatever comfort they may give to those who favour such roundabout methods of promoting a cause, good, bad or, like most causes, merely muddled. Amichai is a complicated character in whose make-up indignation, sometimes violent, is certainly a constituent, but only one of many, which ...”

“... to peer to check if this is an – or the – underworld. In her seething city-settings, paranoia may be the saving of you, and yet paranoia does have, too, a hideously masochistic alluring power. She is the poet of these death-bearing pheromones of fear. Found in the Street is her exact territory; she patrols these Greenwich Village streets as if from a ...”

“... from Sex and Destiny were published recently in the press, which gives a cue for how the book may be used fruitfully. It collapses as a sustained argument, but much is said locally, on its three main themes, that is forceful and convincing. Some excellent roasting, scalding and melting is performed in Chapter Eight on modern ‘sex religion’, and the ...”

“... at those capable of capturing the party for Benn. It has been a successful operation. Tony Benn may be Britain’s first Post-Bourgeois Politician. ‘Post-bourgeois’, a term of art in American political science, describes the politics of the post-industrial society in which acquisitiveness among the increasingly affluent and educated middle classes ...”

“... to his Romantic forbears. The method of the book means that we have to attend to a great deal we may have heard before, such as brief expositions of Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Schiller: but it is true enough that the ideology, the pathology and the eschatology of the period under discussion have connections with those thinkers and many others roughly their ...”

“... There was even a romantic tinge to patronage. The two great loves of Balfour’s life were May Lyttelton, whose early death had robbed him of an intended bride, and Mary Wyndham, Lady Elcho. May’s brother Alfred was appointed Colonial Secretary, and Mary’s brother George was brought into the Cabinet. Under ...”

“... The past may be another country, but when we try to study it the problem seems to be not so much that they do things differently as that they give such a different account of what they do. To understand past intellectual activities, in particular, we often have to divide up what for us is a single concern, or bring together issues which we treat as distinct ...”

“... the teasing inventions of Sir Thomas More. More’s vision of the good place which is no place may have been inspired by the voyages of Columbus’s follower Amerigo Vespucci, who explored the coast of Venezuela and, absurdly, managed to adorn with his name both of the continents of the New World. The literary tradition of Utopian landfalls ranges from the ...”