“... writer, and the South American writer, by virtue of being distant and close at the same time, had more ‘rights’ to Western culture than anyone in any Western nation. He went on to explore the extraordinary contribution of the Jewish artist to Western culture and of the Irish writer to English literature. For them, he argued, it was ‘enough, the fact of ...”

“... and stockpiled, hoping vaguely to put together a kind of literary revue. When I began to think in more narrative terms these parodies proved a stumbling-block, as I found I had to create characters who could conceivably have had memories of, say, the age of Oscar Wilde, Lawrence of Arabia and of Bloomsbury. Hence the Claridge’s couple, Hugh and Moggie. When ...”

“... were the ever receding vistas of The Anathemata (1952), his epic about the matter of Britain. As Thomas Dilworth documented in his earlier David Jones in the Great War (2012), Jones saw more active service than any other British writer, all of it as a private, and outlived nearly all his contemporaries, with the exception ...”

“... argument he’ll step back to concede that a particularly seductive passage might add up to little more than ‘a special effect in prose, controlled by me’. When he expounds his subjects’ thinking from the inside, there are moments of heightened, rhapsodic identification. A chapter of Backroom Boys tracks the process by which two Cambridge students, David ...”

“... parts of the vast legislative output, but historians of Parliament focused their lenses very much more narrowly. This rather cosy story of politics and parties received a severe jolt in 1929 when Lewis Namier posed the question why men entered Parliament and answered that, at least in the middle of the 18th century, they mostly did so for reasons that had ...”

“... that passed before the decree expired the military was allowed an orgy of shooting, flogging and more or less arbitrary executions. The Cornhill Magazine put the number of deaths at 439 and of floggings at 600. If this had been all, there would probably have been a transient fuss in England, after which Eyre’s career would have continued to flourish. The ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... these realities. He thinks the presence of a Greek ethnarch as head of state made it that much more difficult for the Turkish Cypriots to identify with the new order, and recalls that Archbishop Makarios had told him that his greatest error was in permitting Greek military forces to establish themselves permanently on the island. It is true that Cyprus’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”