“... earnestness rather than a little less. One of the attractions of nonsense poetry both as reading matter and as a subject for critical prose is that it appears to offer a holiday from all that dreary business of worrying about what the poet might be trying to say: centuries before the French Symbolists started going on about it, some English comic verse had ...”

“... PPE examination papers an anxious and ‘with-it’ question asked for elucidation of the sage ‘Herbert Maracuse’. That was good for a chuckle. But it wasn’t all doddering and quavering: Home Secretary Callaghan, that red-faced beadle, knew his stern duty. All the Fleet Street rags, the day after Grosvenor Square, printed a leering pic of a girl ...”

“... together several times, they were seen in the same way, both key figures in determining what Herbert Read called, in Horizon, ‘the fate of modern painting’. John Lehmann used their work to illustrate a volume of Penguin New Writing and Peter Watson, who co-curated the first exhibition of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, chose both of them, along ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of theatrical taste favouring plays that resemble, in Jonson’s judgment, undesirable organic matter (mould, leftover food, discarded fish). No doubt some mouldy tale, Like Pericles, and stale As the shrieve’s crusts, and nasty as his fish – Scraps out of every dish Thrown forth, and raked into the common tub, May keep up the ...”

“... shuffled off its earlier meaning, with its implications of growth and improvement. In 1864 Herbert Spencer had removed some of the ambiguity of On the Origin of Species by recasting its subtitle ‘The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life’ as the pithier ‘Survival of the Fittest’. Science declared that there was no ...”

“... the anti-Vietnam and Civil Rights movements, the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, all of which seemed to matter a great deal more. For my part, I found that, with the exception of a few people like Chomsky and the late Eqbal Ahmad, no one in ‘the movement’ wanted anything to do with me or my interest in violations of Palestinian rights as a result of Israel’s ...”

“... tells a much more nuanced story. From the start, she emphasises that Latin was always as much a matter of ritual as of substance. True, the school, from the 16th century on, was ‘Latin country’. Boys were required to speak Latin in Renaissance classrooms, where spies, known as ‘foxes’, informed on those who slipped into the vernacular. Masters ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... clear that this leaves a lacuna of some three months in Xenophon’s text. Explanations remain a matter of guesswork. Did he fail to keep a diary? Or did poor leadership on Xenophon’s part lead to the death of some of his men in the late winter snows, deaths he didn’t want to admit to? We will never know. The point, rather, is the deceptive smoothness of ...”

“... Hall. They read Proust and Spengler, Macaulay and Gibbon, Tom Paine and Cobbett, Hume and Herbert Spencer. They never missed a Harold Laski public lecture. They went in a solid phalanx to hear Shaw, Belloc and Chesterton debate at Kingsway Hall. And they formed an archaeological group to look for relics of Norman and Roman London whenever they ...”

“... in universities, the professions and white-collar jobs aroused resentment. Native, endemic and matter-of-fact, anti-Jewish prejudice now became frenzied, and the student outbursts were brutal. In the spring of 1932, rioting closed down the university in Bucharest, and precipitated the dissolution of the Iron Guard, which now had Ionescu’s sympathy. In ...”

“... may be significant: even when playing with strangers, the figure one cuts in their eyes may matter. Nevertheless, a simple conclusion is that players of the ultimatum game are oriented to a norm that enjoins ‘fairness’, and perceived violations of the norm are punished, even at personal cost, by rejection of unfair offers. If people are not homines ...”