“... because they’re mainly used to freshen up a dim memory of something Winston Churchill (or was it Benjamin Franklin?) might have once said. But that practice is also a long-term consequence of the history of the word ‘quotation’ and its weaponisation in religious polemics of the 17th century.Works calling themselves ‘dictionaries’ of quotations began ...”

“... he adopted a new, liberal constitution and openly abjured his old projects of conquest. He seduced Benjamin Constant, his keenest and sharpest liberal critic, into becoming a collaborator. And on Saint Helena, enduring the petty humiliations inflicted by his British jailer, Sir Hudson Lowe, the vaguely comic turned intensely tragic; a man mocked as pathetic ...”

“... for a beautiful young woman to see to him as Jane Eyre looked after old Mr Rochester,’ Benjamin Taylor writes in his memoir, Here We Are. ‘What he got instead was me.’ Taylor was young, goyish and gay, all of which Roth was not. ‘I can’t be the first gay man to have been an older straight man’s mainstay,’ Taylor writes, but the ...”

“... boundaries came into existence, to reinforce the physical ones – the ‘White’ and ‘Black’ town – that were already there. The social and racial structure of the India Kipling was born in and later returned to as a journalist was determined by the Mutiny and, later, by the defeat of the Ilbert Bill, which would have given Indian magistrates ...”

“... no longer even figure in the top hundred. Andrew and Robert are barely hanging on. But Joshua, Benjamin, Samuel and Joseph have been restored to the places they held two hundred years ago, after languishing for years in the unfashionable regions of the charts. It is even possible to trace the rise of particular combinations of sounds. The popularity of ...”

“... America was one of shiny appliances, finned automobiles with hood ornaments fit for Vikings, black and white television sets piping perky laugh-track entertainment into the living room as the kids did their homework lying on the rug, backyard barbecues, pool parties, and drunken passes and spats at cocktail parties that entered local lore. Updike’s ...”

“... in the full consciousness of the purity and lucidity of one’s motives (mine are worthy of Benjamin Franklin) one asks one’s self what one is doing in that galère.’ Michael Anesko’s strikingly authoritative ‘Friction with the Market’: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship gives a good many detailed and salutary answers in its ...”

“... He had told the story to his new heart doctor earlier that day, who said it was a myth even then. Black’s Medical Dictionary was now no longer the volume much consulted over breakfast that it had once been. He owned two editions – the 28th (1968) and the 40th (2002). In the first, a stroke is defined as ‘a popular name for apoplexy ...”

“... National Gallery’ and they chose not an Old Master but a huge painting by a living artist, Benjamin West (thereby ‘saving for the nation’ a painting by a North American artist that had in fact been commissioned for a North American institution). The most adventurous collectors of Old Masters in the first half of the 19th century, such as Lord ...”

“... said run web being all white, but … Thompson did bring [her] a much coarser woollen web with a black list, [she] being very certain that it was not her web.’ Once woven, the cloth had to be ‘litted’ or dyed – the spinster Jane Browne was hired to dye some wool green, blue or white in 1630 – and if it was one of the loose-woven ‘old ...”

“... helping to keep white liberal panellists occupied and furrowed until the ferocious later phase of Black Power made them all squirm.) Kazin had been unable to attend the symposium itself but, never one to miss a party, popped into the reception being thrown by Commentary’s editor-in-chief Norman Podhoretz and his wife, the writer and editor Midge Decter, one ...”

“... lose or reduce the extravagance but can’t quite fall for it either. An example would be Walter Benjamin’s wonderful remark about missed experiences in Proust: None of us has time to live the true dramas of the life that we are destined for. This is what ages us – this and nothing else. The wrinkles and creases on our faces are the registration of the ...”

“... between the cotton-pickin’ southern slave states and the northern Yankee country, in which a black man might be free.In form, and in content also, Mason & Dixon is, on a Which?-guide level, many things rolled into one. It’s an epic in ways both obvious and not-so-obvious like the Odyssey, and it’s a simple-hearted buddy story, too. It’s a burlesque ...”

“... But no one doubts that, a pocket still to be mopped up behind borders that already extend to the Black Sea, they will enter it in due course. The great issue facing the Union lies further east, at the point where no vast steppe confounds the eye, but a long tradition has held that a narrow strip of water separates one world from another. No one has ever ...”

“... it was possible on 11 January 2015 for François Hollande, Angela Merkel, David Cameron, Benjamin Netanyahu and three dozen world leaders to assemble shoulder to shoulder at the place de la République, to march twenty abreast with arms interlinked and to chant with the crowd of a million: ‘Je suis Charlie.’A sequel in a lower strain occurred ...”