“... an attempt to pin down every last detail of the argument is that all too often one cannot see the wood for the twigs. But it is not only style that is at work in hindering the reader. Cavell deploys Wittgensteinian resources in order to show us that such problems as that of the relationship of the mind to the external world, or of how we can know what other ...”

“... patron saint of all royal biographers and journalists’. Plainly there is a lot of dead wood to be cleared away. According to Lady Longford, George V was given a diet of Bagehot by Professor J.R. Tanner, of St John’s College, Cambridge; George VI by J.R.M. Butler of Trinity College, Cambridge; and the Queen as Princess Elizabeth by Sir Henry ...”

“... Russian novel. Cruising in a public lavatory in Kensington Park, Will saves the life of Charles Nantwich, an 83-year-old gay peer of the realm, ‘the sort of chap who turns up in the lives of other people’. Nantwich is physically frail and prone to ‘blanking’ – sudden mental absences – but he is more purposeful and manipulative than is ...”

“... characters – Aaron Burr and the Emperor Julian – as well as in his satires. In Burr, Charles Schuyler, a character invented by Vidal to be this vice president’s biographer, says his subject is ‘a man of perfect charm and fascination. A monster, in short.’ Not unlike the novel’s author. ‘I suspect Cromwell was right,’ Vice President ...”

“... 1990s. Among these buildings are the Channel 4 Headquarters near Victoria station (1990-94); 88 Wood St (1991-99) and Lloyd’s Register (1993-2000) in the City; Broadwick House in Soho (1996-2002); Chiswick Park, a business park in West London (1999-); Waterside, the corporate headquarters of Marks & Spencer, in Paddington Basin (1993-); and the Grand ...”

“... been any reported sightings at Strawberry Hill. Instead, with its papier-mâché battlements and wood and plaster fireplaces, it was what Walpole called ‘a plaything house’: a stage set designed to cultivate a sense of ‘gloomth’, or gloomy warmth.The Castle of Otranto, too, emphasises its confected artificiality. With a complicated plot involving a ...”

“... The Sleep of Venus (1806), were perfect expressions of feminine talent, according to the critic Charles-Paul Landon, whereas ‘ambitious, moving, and often terrible conceptions’ wouldn’t have been. In Britain, Cosway was scolded for attempting ‘grand or horrible’ narratives (those closest in aesthetic to the Burkean sublime), once being informed ...”

“... he fits the rivalries between France and the Holy Roman Empire into the tiny world of castle, wood and ford which could be seen from the windows of his childhood home at La Devinière. (It still can.) His wars are like children’s games: he delighted in games, while seeing most of them as ways of wasting time when extended beyond infancy. Great ...”

“... enough. When W.H. Davies says he saw the wind dragging the corn by her golden hair into a dark wood, the startling and exciting information goes straight inside us. Complex reactions then occur; theorists of rhetoric can tell us how the effect is achieved; but the truth of the information is what really matters, as when Donne tells us: ’Tis the year’s ...”

“... in every language, Therefore unreal, out beyond a gap No one can cross, figures inside a mirror. Charles Boyle – a stouter Carcanet poet – would sooner lose his touring bike, his rucksack, all his travellers cheques, than admit such diminution. Ranging between London and North Africa, Israel and somewhere (close to Jamestown?) called Merriland, his new ...”

“... its shuttered finish. This was painstaking: ‘Air bubbles which naturally cling to the rough wood texture needed to be knocked loose by vibrating the wet concrete mechanically after it was poured but before it set, but not too vigorously: over-vibrating concrete would shake the gravel to the bottom.’ He finds that even John Betjeman, the ...”

“... who shot Mark Duggan is to be returned to firearms duty just as was the officer who shot Jean Charles de Menezes. The Met doesn’t seem to understand what is wrong with this. It’s just one word. Tact.20 February. The walls of the sitting room and the study in Gloucester Crescent are just as I decorated them nearly half a century ago. I have always been ...”

“... heart, has perhaps less taste than Emily Brontë for the wild solitudes of the moors; indeed Charles Jennings in Up North, his ‘travels beyond the Watford Gap’, an only half-humorous exploration of regional difference, complains that the North is deficient in open space. In the current denigration of the North, whether at the hands of writers or of ...”

“... from the educational Puritan ‘godly books’ Swift might possibly have read as a child, to Charles I’s imprisonment in Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight (Sir William Temple, Swift’s patron, briefly toured there in 1648 as a young man). Sometimes, the awareness of gaps and things missing leads to provocative conjectures: might the odd absence ...”

“... symptoms in 1872; Parkinson (James) got his tremor in 1817 and soon thereafter the great anatomist Charles Bell, whom Darwin admired, could be even more precise about ‘his’ disorder – Bell’s palsy – of the seventh cranial nerve; Alzheimer’s disease after Alois of early 20th-century Munich; Gilles de la Tourette’s impulsive tics and Korsakoff’s ...”