“... of Northern Europe into Western Christendom is described, and there are chapters on the three major causes of the movement towards a more diverse identity for Christian believers in different parts of Europe. ‘The Achievement of Gregory the Great’ shows how occasional and piecemeal were the reforms which, taken together, made Gregory effectively the ...”

“... script is the writing of the Indus Valley civilisation of Pakistan, which is now the subject of a major study by Asko Parpola. This attractive and sophisticated writing is known chiefly from the magnificent seal impressions found in the ruins of Harappa, Mohenjo-Daro and Chanhu-Daro, although economic contacts spread them as far west as Mesopotamia. They date ...”

“... the scurrility and noise that can be dredged up from ancient marginalia. Much sounder to read the major ‘accounts’ of, say, the ‘Reign of Nero’ as projects that speak to the presence of historians in history. Thus Tacitus tells us that Seneca, caught up in the same conspiracy as Lucan, committed suicide by cutting his wrists, ‘but his aged ...”

“... and was praised by scholars including Scaliger, Sidney and Minturno. Pollard’s major innovation is to argue for the impact of Greek tragedy on popular theatre. It has long been recognised that the ‘university wits’ of the generation before Shakespeare had a classical education. The consequences have been looked for in the contribution ...”

“... fire, killing both parents in the front and wounding one of the six children in the back. The major at the base asked Hondros to delay sending the pictures for ‘a couple of days’, pending some kind of investigation. Hondros’s instinct was to send them and leave it to others to argue the toss. Later that night, with the images safely dispatched, he ...”

“... officials and ministers more regularly and co-operatively than at any time in the Thatcher-Major period. But they do so on an issue by issue basis. They have almost no representative presence in the British state. There is no longer a National Economic Development Council – flaccid beast though it was – on which they could have equal status with ...”

“... counterparts in the UK would have claimed was far above the heads of most of their readers. Every major French newspaper, polling agency, political party and radio or television station has its own expert political sociologist. The politicologues quickly realised that they could earn far more writing in newspapers than an academic election study could ever ...”

“... the close, and Henry James is going to address over four hundred letters to him. He weathers two major storms, one emotional and the other resulting from a rash claim that if not a poet he is at least a scholar. Becoming Librarian of the House of Lords, he luxuriates acceptably amid aristocrats in stately halls. His last public appearance is in January 1928 ...”

“... in a Boat in the same form, will have a mild idea of the task which faced the Cambridge graduate John Smith (a sizar, married with one child) when in 1819 he was hired to decipher the six volumes of Samuel Pepys’s diary on which Magdalene College had sat for over a century. Smith did not know the system of shorthand the diarist had used, but he was a ...”

“... The best summation of the importance of naval position was given in 1904 by the British admiral John Fisher: ‘Five keys lock up the world! Singapore, the Cape, Alexandria, Gibraltar, Dover. These five keys belong to England.’ But if you leave strategic bases aside, it is often the show of naval force, rather than its application, that has proved most ...”

“... after 1860 and especially in the years after 1870.’ But this statement is from the foreword to John Ruskin: The Early Years, 1819-1859 – the only volume so far issued. The general judgment seems to me to be right. What might meanwhile be useful is to reflect on the changing perceptions of Ruskin, from the vantage-point of this latest and evidently ...”

“... enjoy?) the condition are known – include Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Kandinsky, Nabokov and Hockney. John Harrison’s Synaesthesia: The Strangest Thing, a scientific and historical study, is due from Oxford in March. The condition has been dismissed by at least one anonymous ‘notable scientist’ as ‘romantic neurology’, but in the foreword to ...”

“... Hone had also just written and published three parodies of the Book of Common Prayer: The Late John Wilkes’s Catechism of a Ministerial Member, The Political Litany and The Sinecurists’ Creed, which satirised the venality of Tory MPs willing to say, vote for and even believe whatever their ministers told them to in exchange for the sinecures and ...”

“... both are made by the individual, who puts himself into them, puts in his ‘life illusion’, as John Cowper Powys called it, his unconscious fears and desires. History will not work without fiction, or at least the fictive principle, which Scott renounced as far as he could. This of course amounts to choosing a principle of another kind, but a negative ...”

“... of his own listeners. ‘Detecting sexism in the writers of the past,’ he writes, ‘forms a major part of the literary-critical endeavour nowadays.’ Above all, he ridicules ‘that sad tendency people have to want to believe that in the past everybody thought just one thing until, by a wholly inexplicable process, they suddenly all changed their minds ...”