“... but an attempt to rehabilitate Scots. His prejudices, apparent in his annotations and confirmed by Sir Kenneth Dover’s excellent memoir in the Proceedings of the British Academy, were a dislike of the English and a hatred of Catholicism (Anglo- as well as Roman, I suspect). Dover records that ‘he often spoke as if he regarded the Border as a ...”

“... identical twins were separated at birth; neither knew she had a twin. Years later, they chanced to be in the same place at the same time, and each was mistaken for the other, until they were finally brought together, all misunderstandings were explained, and everyone lived happily ever after. This is what I would call a myth: a story which people continue to ...”

“... and address to Homeliest Girl Contest Editor. We will not print names, and the photographs will be ‘masked’. Our art department will paint the masks on the photographs to obviate identification. Here is the chance for New York’s homeliest girl. Her misfortune may make a fortune right away. Somewhere in the archives of the Mirror, a masked Rosa ...”

“... It looks with distaste on whatever is integral, self-identical, smugly replete, and is fascinated by lack, belatedness, deadlock, self-undoing. Works of literature catch its attention once they begin to come unstuck or contradict themselves, when they unravel at the edges or betray an eloquent silence at their heart. Like some remorseless therapist, the ...”

“... There is a sinister painting by the 18th-century artist Francis Hayman of a couple frolicking on a seesaw. A youth soars triumphantly into the air, but his hold seems precarious. His female companion descends smilingly to the ground, only to tumble back into the lascivious arms of another man. Altogether an appropriately ambivalent emblem, one might think, for the vicissitudes that James Boswell would experience throughout his life, and the turbulence of his reputation since his death ...”

“... when even missionary bishops – who, a previous Archbishop of Canterbury once warned, tended to be ‘men of eccentric mode of proceeding’ – would find themselves at ten-yearly intervals firmly clasped in an Establishment embrace. Fifty or sixty years ago there would be a Lord Mayor’s banquet at the Guildhall, a ...”

“... till the publication in 1981 of a book focused on England: Patronage in the Renaissance, edited by Guy Lytle and Stephen Orgel. Taking their cue from Lytle and Orgel, F.W. Kent and Patricia Simons have turned the proceedings of a conference held in Melbourne in 1983 into a valuable volume of essays on patronage in Renaissance Italy. What is particularly ...”

“... Between their nocturnal duties as devils on the riverbank, the Japanese soldiers were employed by day for looting. According to sociologist Lewis Smythe, one of the American professors in Nanking, the pillage began as private enterprise. ‘Japanese soldiers,’ he wrote, ‘needed private carriers to help them struggle along under great loads.’ ...”

“... countries changed. It almost seemed as if people, young people anyway, got sick only in order to be cured. As if medical skill needed volunteers on whom to exhibit its tricks. After the Second World War tuberculosis no longer killed a substantial proportion of its already decreasing number of victims. To see the young die from infectious disease became as ...”

“... My course of life has been so routinary, that the keenest eye for point or picture would be at fault before such remediless commonplace. We will really say no more on a topic so sterile.’ Not so, responds Robert Richardson; we will say 670 pages more on the topic. By the end you might wonder whether Emerson ...”

“... Forster spoke of round and flat characters, as if they were two types of doll; the flat ones could be made lifelike by shaking them vigorously. The gulf between childhood toys and adult reading is bridged by fantasy tales such as Pinocchio, where the puppet comes to life, and Hoffmann’s ...”

“... murders or attempted genocides. Others, whether earlier or later, fall into categories that are, by comparison, comprehensible. They arise either out of tribal wars, however bloody, as in Rwanda-Burundi or Bosnia, or out of colonial conquest, as in Chechnya or, in the 19th century, North America, Australia or parts of Africa. The tyrannies of Stalin and ...”

“... the laager,’ John Nauright and Timothy Chandler enter the reservation that ‘such notions can be taken too far.’ Indeed they can. An inward-facing huddle of wagons, their occupants locked in some obscure struggle of their own, would have presented little problem to a marauding Zulu impi, unless that of throwing its assegais straight while doubled up ...”

“... was in part a physical necessity. His eyesight, always bad, was failing. A memoir of Degas by Sickert describes ‘what a torment it was to draw when he could only see round the spot at which he was looking and never the spot itself’. Sickert believed that the late work was an inspired adaptation to apparently intolerable conditions: It may ...”

“... to think of it, British recognition of Bishop herself was belated; for decades she was upstaged by Robert Lowell, probably because he lived in England and behaved in a way that seemed more certifiably poetic. Now Merrill is available to the English in a slim volume of his best work, selected by him shortly before his ...”