“... uses every available one to allow us to glimpse a life of companionship of the kind to which John Milton aspired in a scholar’s marriage: his wife’s chamber was placed next to his study in the house which he most frequently occupied, ‘a proximity’, MacCulloch says, ‘which not all scholars have welcomed in their ...”

“... demise seemed in keeping with this general impression of hopelessness. ‘I cannot say his death took me altogether by surprise,’ Arnold confided to a friend. ‘I had long a foreboding something was deeply wrong with him.’Though his biographers have never been able to decide whether Clough was an utterly singular or thoroughly representative figure (Mr ...”

“... must put a ban on the Jews.’ Marcus found himself friendless; his grades plummeted; he took out his bitterness in a student paper called the Saturday Evening Pest. ‘The whole institution is a lie,’ he wrote of Yale, ‘and serves as a cloak of respectability for a social and athletic club.’ After two years, he dropped out, moved to ...”

“... clarity of seeing, an acknowledgment that this is what painting is. Just as the young John Richardson, visiting Braque’s studio for the first time, felt that he had arrived ‘at the very heart of painting’. But these apparently quiet artists often turn out to have been more far-sighted and more radical than we assume. Corot, for example, once ...”

“... did not appear until 1837 and was quickly supplanted by two popularising and very popular works, John Forster’s The Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith (1848) and Washington Irving’s Life of Oliver Goldsmith (1849). Forster and Irving built on Prior’s research to reinstate – affectionately, but still damagingly – the simple, unworldly ...”

“... mine. For love and family in her case; in mine, improbably and occasionally grimly, for work. It took me a while to get used to G, as I’d like coyly to go on calling it. I started off part-time. Like Persephone, one term in two. I bought a lady’s bicycle and slept on a colleague’s Vietnam-era camp-bed in a short-let plywood apartment (‘it’s called ...”

“... Panther party militant and the festival along with it: ‘I think this is a pile of shit while John Sinclair rots in prison.’ (Like Hoffman, Pete Townshend went off-message from ‘the spirit of Woodstock’ at that point. ‘Fuck off!’ he announced. ‘Fuck off my fucking stage!’) But Lang never imagined the festival as a political event and it ...”

“... he was also strongly partisan; on occasions, he came close to ‘going native’, in the manner of John Reed with the Red Guards in Petrograd. His journalism always threatened to tip over into a more direct, military involvement – until he finally became, and died, a soldier. A South African born into a liberal, newspaper-owning family in the Eastern ...”

“... our knowledge of Nature is always socially mediated. This is one of several issues which divide John Rees, who has written an erudite, illuminating introduction to this book, and Slavoj Žižek, who has provided a characteristically provocative ‘postface’ for it. Roughly speaking, Rees seeks rather stiffly to reclaim Lukács for a certain Marxist ...”

“... the Cravens ‘were our near neighbours, and old acquaintances, and they were gentlemen.’ She took the name of Wilson (quite why is still not clear) and from then on life was a succession of lovers. At least, according to Wilson it was a succession: her biographer more plausibly suggests a certain amount of overlap. She was not, as Woolf wrote, ‘always ...”

“... design and the stylisation of animals and vegetation this need not mean that their patrons took any interest in Byzantine floor plans. As an exemplary archival historian, Schulz is especially alert to what was not documented. Inventories never mention the storage of boats and boating equipment on the ground floor, yet on his visits to palaces he is ...”

“... more depressingly, as I am able to tell it. The least of its inaccuracies are the dates, which I took from My Life in CIA: they are only slightly wrong. There are far more alarming errors in every sentence. Take, for example, the phrase ‘he had been befriended by Georges Perec.’ I chose the word ‘befriended’ because the Harry Mathews in my ...”

“... two heroes stand marooned in their Beatness on that sunlit hill, ‘a devilish look, and he never took his eyes off mine for a long time. I looked back and blushed ... we would stick together and be buddies till we died.’ Spelling out the significance of this for the legend, Campbell notes that ‘theirs is a platonic love, though bedecked by romantic ...”

“... microscope, he carved and painted sculptures measurable in microns and millimetres; his Pope John Paul IIholds a cross crafted from a hair divided into sixths, making its width slightly less than the diameter of two red blood cells. His portrait of Little Red Riding Hood, whose diminutive has never been so well-deserved, features a mere speck of a girl ...”

“... will be no one but soldiers and bandits. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ John Bagot Glubb, a young lieutenant bearing wounds from the war in France, arrived in Mesopotamia in 1920. His assignment was to command armed patrols through the desert of what would become, under its first Western occupier, Iraq. The British bureaucracy, he ...”