“... sometimes spontaneously, at worst like tonic water shaken to restore a semblance of lost vitality. Peter Conrad goes in more for weight. You could say of him what the earlier James extravagantly observed of the earlier Conrad, that he offers a prolonged hovering flight of the subjective over the outstretched ground of the case exposed. In other words, he ...”

“... Seven miles high above the Bay of Biscay and bound for Madrid, reading the daily papers is the alternative to a British Airways breakfast at noon. What is news? A kiss, it seems. England has won a Test Match and Emburey is conveying his congratulations to Ian Botham. It is front-page news for the Guardian but back-page for the Daily Express ...”

“... 4 January. A Christmas letter from Cami Elbow, wife of Peter Elbow, an American college friend who teaches English at Amherst: Life in Amherst is very placid. Even grammatically correct. In December the town decided to encourage shoppers to patronise the downtown stores with free parking. They ordered plastic bags to cover up the parking meters but the bags arrived with the message wrongly punctuated: ‘Season’s Greeting’s ...”

“... The Bronze Horseman of Pushkin’s famous poem is Falconet’s equestrian statue of Peter the Great in St Petersburg. It was ordered by Catherine the Great (Petro primo Catharina secunda). Modelled on the statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome, it was meant to evoke the wise emperor extending a main protectrice. Joseph de Maistre commented that one doesn’t know whether this hand protects or threatens ...”

“... it takes to think about a light bulb (apparently it takes two; see below). A lot of the fun of reading these papers is seeing how an exiguous collection of commitments plays out in so many different domains. But, though it’s fun, it’s also frustrating. Davidson’s format often doesn’t give him room to make clear exactly what his general principles ...”

“... whose glinting eyes, in Reynolds’s 1778 portrait, stare fixedly past us from the dust-jacket of Peter Martin’s biography. Indeed the book’s steady prose, for all its professions of admiration, does little to suggest that Martin (the first writer to undertake a life of Malone since 1860) has managed to muster much of the personal empathy and enthusiasm ...”

“... hero, who loses his reason in the St Petersburg flood of 1824, and the Bronze Horseman himself, Peter the Great. But Evgeny represents Pushkin the man and Peter Pushkin the poet, as Sinyavsky thinks they do, how does he square Pushkin the man’s pride in his ancestors – to which Sinyavsky has earlier alluded – with ...”

“... add: ‘Why did gold become money in the first place?’ Or: ‘Will gold ever be money again?’ Peter Bernstein’s history of gold as money is very much better at answering the first question than the other two. Pecuniary anthropology is very, very perilous. In the absence of evidence, both Aristotle and Adam Smith made implausible conjectures about the ...”

“... Tudor scholarship, A.G. Dickens and G.R. Elton. I remember very well my excitement on first reading in 1964, the year of its publication, Professor Dickens’s The English Reformation. His thesis was almost precisely the opposite of Scarisbrick’s. What he portrayed was a late Medieval Church which, while not all wrong, was for a whole series of ...”

“... accounts of the failure of mothers to visit their infants at nurse make distressing reading, as do the horrifying descriptions of how foundlings were treated. It must be true that such practices were more common in France, and especially in Paris, than they were in England. But no one whose knowledge was confined to books like that of Mme ...”

“... exuberantly invented or appropriated names – Ikea, Asraboth, Otis Lemming – ambush you into reading the documentary account of a murder as if it were simply another overplayed punch line. The switch can be interpreted in several ways. You could assume that you are coming under satirical attack – that Depraved Indifference is a sly exposure of the ...”

“... filled by Mr Williams – provide a continuing narrative and one that makes compelling reading: it leaves this reader at least with a strong sense of frustration that the diary should end on 9 October 1956, with the still more dramatic events of Gaitskell’s remaining six years as Leader either unrecorded or the record lost. Unlike Attlee who ...”

“... with falsifying his official journals. Queller’s catalogue of sins and sinners makes lively reading. It is a valuable corrective to what historians call the ‘myth of Venice’, the idea that the Republic had a perfect constitution and a selfless ruling class, an idea which Queller dismisses as the concoction of ‘sycophantic’ Humanists. The trouble ...”

“... the companion exhibition at the National Gallery, which deals with Degas as a collector, is like reading the other half of a correspondence. The tonal purity of the little Roman landscape by Corot was answered by a similar precision of notation in Degas’s early race-course and ballet-school pictures. The pinks and blues of a Gauguin flower piece are a ...”

“... it required a great deal more moral courage than I had at the time.’ What was needed, on this reading, was a more courageous Redeemer than Joseph, not one who was cleverer. Here are the implicit terms on which Joseph deferred to Thatcher’s superior claims as leader, while she deferred to his as prophet. Two further points help to establish Joseph’s ...”