“... the ‘fringe’ people will be either to conform (i.e. buy some trousers), conceding that they may not be so different in other ways either, or else to fetishise their distinctiveness as perceived from the centre. In the latter case, the revenge of the centre is sweet: send in the debunkers; Hugh Trevor-Roper, who has a selective nose for fakes, got the ...”

“... her text – is the transformation of this primal rage in the work of art. ‘The motivation may be murderous,’ she asserts, ‘but the form must be absolutely strict and pure.’ Nowhere is this paradoxical combination of uncontrolled rage and self-conscious formal absorption better captured than in the 1993 documentary film about Bourgeois directed ...”

“... seeing it as a specific feature of Elizabethan-Renaissance men and women. Well, Forman may have been a one-off city goat, as his contemporary the Italian miller Menocchio, recorded by Carlo Ginzburg, may have been a one-off village sceptic; but you can’t deny that he provides a heap of evidence about the ...”

“... self-advertisement, the presupposition that, for example, eugenics is bad and modesty good may no longer command broad consensus.) Although the book is centred on Victorian England (after a brief excursion into the 17th century), much of its considerable gravitas derives from Levine’s conviction that the dying-to-know narrative still shapes the ethos ...”

“... governments: so far even the rich haven’t been able to buy their way out of a traffic jam. This may change – we might yet see bus lanes redesignated as toll lanes. The contributors to Autopia grapple with these problems, but for the most part not very energetically. Allen Samuels tells us that the car ‘like all epochal icons . . . does not mean one ...”

“... enticed scholars from throughout the Greek world to make their home at Alexandria: Euclid – who may also have been born in the dusty Egyptian village that existed on the site before Alexander founded his city – wrote his Elements there, and Archimedes passed through as a student. Eratosthenes, Strabo and Galen all relied on the riches of ...”

“... main plot.The life and works of the Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet (1796-1874) may serve as an epitome. After studying mathematics, Quetelet persuaded the Belgian Government to send him to Paris to study astronomy with Pierre-Simon de Laplace, the acknowledged doyen of the discipline. There he imbibed not only Laplace’s celestial ...”

“... you happen to be subjecting the neighbours to home movies. The ashtrays are overflowing. There may be an alcoholic, active or reformed, lying on the living-room sofa. Is he thinking about the pint of whiskey he has hidden under the cushions; or has he just got home from an exhausting AA meeting? He has a job he does not like and is not getting on with his ...”

“... and London; and what Italy meant to him in the 1920s is very rarely considered. Irish writers may discover their voice in exile, but critical attention concentrates on the vision of Ireland thus achieved, rather than the way it may have been conditioned by their foreign surroundings. One would expect Joyce to be the ...”

“... critics of GM foods are governed by mere sentiment, by soft-centred unreflective feelings that may conflict with their more considered judgments. On the other hand, if the word is understood in its 18th-century sense, sentiment is not a feeling that could fail to be engaged. In that sense, it is an emotion associated with what moves and affects us, and its ...”

“... closing with Eric Hobsbawm’s ‘industry and empire’, is more rooted in older approaches than may appear at first sight. And some of the detail, too, is questionable. Free trade was a remarkably tenacious doctrine, lasting well beyond the 1880s (in fact, until 1932). Revenue derived from direct taxation did not begin to overtake that derived from indirect ...”

“... and ‘tragic’ mysteries of passion, but rather passion as a form of self-importance. God may be dead or dying but passion is not; and passion is now the Great Dictator. This, of course, makes Márai rather more of a writer of his time, a writer wary of the rhetoric of the self-aggrandising. For him the idea of an individual or a nation having a ...”

“... this idea, preferring even now to think of Brodsky as not much better than a traitor. They may have disagreed with the crude way in which it was articulated, but they would have sided with the official view of his departure: good riddance to bad rubbish. From a more cynical perspective, the removal of a talent such as Brodsky’s made things easier for ...”

“... a Lord Chief Justice in 1676, since when blasphemy has been an offence in common law; the sanction may be asleep but it is not dead. If tempted to believe that it is, one needs to recall the 1976 prosecution of Gay News and the subsequent failure in the House of Lords of an attempt to get rid of it. I’m not sure whether to believe it, but am told it is even ...”

“... and subsidised housing. George Hogarth, a journalist, went to hear the Cyfarthfa band and wrote in May 1850, in Dickens’s Household Words, that he was astonished at their proficiency . . . I heard them perform the overture to Zampa, the Caliph of Baghdad, and Fra Diavolo, Vivi tu and some concerto music from Roberto, Don Giovanni and Lucia, with a ...”