“... Comte de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam came of an illustrious Breton line, latterly more distinguished for its poverty and eccentricity. His grandfather, who fought against the Revolution but failed to thrive under the Restoration, wrote to the Minister of Justice in 1815 that, had his name not been so long already, he would have asked the ...”

“... that will be immune to social and historical distortions, Foucault’s interpretive analytics is more modest and avowedly pragmatic. The methods and results of his histories of the prison and of sexuality are recognisably influenced by social practices, which can only be investigated and diagnosed from within. But we are not as rigidly fixed in these social ...”

“... He stood with the carving implements poised over the ruined saddle. ‘Let me give you some more mutton, my dear.’   ‘No, thank you, uncle – I’ve had plenty.’   ‘You aren’t a great meat-eater, are you, dear,’ said Bertha,‘so the approach of Lent won’t be so much of a hardship for you.’   Ianthe murmured ...”

“... Kitchener, Jack London or Franz Liszt (he came to tell the children to practise their instruments more frequently). But the barmy, scrambled upbringing wasn’t always innocent or even well-intentioned. Although Barnes later said that she loved her grandmother Zadel ‘as a child usually loves its mother’, Philip Herring quotes letters to her from Zadel ...”

“... succeeded in wresting the hegemony from Savile Row. Yet Savile Row dominated male fashion for more than a century, just as the rue de la Paix has dominated female fashion. Tailors have never been given the credit that has gone to couturiers. They have stayed in the shadows, sitting cross-legged or wielding their tape-measures in traditional obscurity. The ...”

“... Auden who created the style which most of his contemporaries sought to imitate, and it is Auden, more than Yeats or Eliot, who is influencing younger poets today. Why Auden’s early style should matter so much sixty years later can be explained, I think, with reference to the success of Northern Irish poetry during the last twenty-five or thirty years. Ever ...”

“... may be pointless to try to establish which World War Two Axis aggressor, Germany or Japan, was the more brutal to the peoples it victimised. The Germans killed six million Jews and 20 million Russians; the Japanese slaughtered as many as 30 million Filipinos, Malays, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Indonesians and Burmese, at least 23 million of them ethnic ...”

“... closed, and that the 11 volumes consisted of ‘selected’ documents, prompted speculation that more sinister material was being concealed. A decisive verdict on Pacelli’s record was also hindered by the lack of any personal papers, which he had ordered to be destroyed after his death, a lack only partly compensated for by the oral and written testimony ...”

“... and the corner incisor in the lower jaw. They may reach a foot in length, although eight inches is more common. Xenophon warns of their heat: the angrier the boar the hotter they become. The tusks of the boar of Kalydon, displayed first in the temple of Athene at Tegea in Arcadia and later in Rome, were reported by Pausanias in the second century AD to be the ...”

“... image consulting and spin’. Stein’s theory of America’s antiquity, which seems even more persuasive today as the country feels its age beside such late-coming upstarts to the modern world as China and India, has implications for how we see American literature. Henry James may have lamented the social thinness of American history, and its ...”

“... incompletion (his two best-known novels, according to Italo Calvino, ‘seem to need only a few more pages to reach their conclusions’) goes with a confusion as to the chronology of composition and a concern that the version we hold in our hands is not definitive. First published in book form in 1963, Acquainted with Grief, or early parts of it, had ...”

“... some convincingly bizarre place names, seemed much like my grandparents’ North Yorkshire only more so, being about 110 per cent Methodist. Scotland was unlike Cornwall and Wales in having fewer chapels and bigger mountains, but the ‘Welcome to Scotland’ signs you drove past at the border didn’t seem different in kind from the familiar and palpably ...”

“... through time by a shared belonging to something that seems to emerge from a steadier, thicker, more grounded past and be on its way to an indestructible, maybe redeeming future. Anderson is the very opposite of an atheist in the face of this religion; or, if he is an unbeliever – and one senses in all of his writings an extraordinary final outsidedness ...”

“... For​ the late French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Thomas Robert Malthus was an indispensable guide to the agrarian past. Le Roy Ladurie applied Malthus’s argument that population grows faster than subsistence to the archives of Languedoc, where, in the empirical detail of parish registers, cadastral surveys, tax rolls and price series, he perceived ‘the immense respiration of a social structure’ over the course of three centuries ...”

“... for a favourite form of loss? He can plausibly be read as saying any of these things, and perhaps more than one at once. But the propositions are not identical, and it’s not easy to choose among them. Can’t we look at what Proust actually wrote? We can look at what he literally wrote, but that’s not quite the same thing. Proust’s phrasing was ‘les ...”