“... That made me search your volume. You are my master and my author; You alone are he from whom I took The good style that has done me honour. It is fitting that Virgil should see himself clearly, and in the harsh light of eternity the facts, in descending order of importance, are as he presents them: that he was born under the false and lying gods, which ...”

“... that English literature had already been taking up the swelling theme of empire – a new book by John McVeagh has much to say about this. ‘How can one write the history of the English-speaking peoples and their empires?’ – a large question on which Calder must have long deliberated before striking out his path. There has been discussion lately as to ...”

“... in some way that might be free from (and free them from) the taint of empire. Oxfam in particular took advantage of a new culture of affluence and of the enthusiasm of (mostly female) volunteers to open charity shops on high streets – shops that could cater to economically diverse customers while also funnelling support to Oxfam’s overseas ...”

“... talking seriously to their US counterparts, including Cold War scholars such as Melvyn Leffler and John Gaddis. Radchenko, more than twenty years younger and so essentially post-Soviet, arrived in the US as an exchange student (improbably, from the island of Sakhalin in the Pacific), wrote a PhD on Sino-Soviet relations under the supervision of Odd Arne Westad ...”

“... is the spur stood on its head). But many prime ministers have fared less well: Chatham and Lord John Russell because there are few private papers; Gladstone and Salisbury because their careers were too long for any one writer to encompass comprehensively; Charles James Fox and Lloyd George because their passion to rule and their ruling passions are so hard ...”

“... and Edward Steichen – and look! here’s Stieglitz himself, whose portrait Cartier-Bresson took in 1946, the lastyear of the great forerunner’s life. Stieglitz’s face has a weary look not unlike that of Robert Flaherty, father of the documentary film, another great forerunner whose portrait Cartier-Bresson ...”

“... public perfomances as a musician. Literature, even more than music, was an art which the Romans took seriously, and about which we know quite a lot: its absence is a shortcoming in an account of the Roman world. Although their work has the subtitle ‘Economy, Society and Culture’ – ‘Culture’ being the title of their tenth, last and weakest chapter ...”

“... winding round the other, each in itself interesting to follow: the investigative routine, ‘Who took the child, and where, and how, and why, and for whose benefit?’ and the psychological question, ‘What sort of people are these, whose lives have interacted, whose failures meet in the crisis of this moment?’ The sort of people who surround Davy, and ...”

“... for the Great Renunciation by projecting his suppressed desire onto the subordinate female. Men took an exhibitionistic pride in the ‘vicarious display’ of the well-dressed women who accompanied them. Naturally the women needed men to manage this imagery. As Hollander puts it, during the 19th century men invented fictions of women for themselves as ...”

“... and always looked smart; as Grant recalled, she ‘tried to smother me with care’. Both parents took him to the cinema. With his mother, Archie went to the genteel Claire Street Picture House (romances, melodramas and tea on the balcony); with his father he went to the brash, barn-like Metropole (slapstick, bad piano-playing and lots of men smoking). Archie ...”

“... Eliot in the Houghton Library; Tennyson’s In Memoriam; Lyndall Gordon’s Eliot’s Early Years; John Mayer’s T.S. Eliot’s Silent Voices; Laforgue’s Hamlet, Mélanges posthumes, Le Concile féerique, and ‘Esthét-ique’; Symons’s The Symbolist Movement in Literature; Maeterlinck’s essay ‘Silence’; Boswell’s Johnson; the OED; Paradise ...”

“... and which came to them by various routes from Caravaggio, would not have suited her. The painter John Opie is reported to have found Vigée Le Brun’s pictures good in ‘the imitation of particular things, velvet, silk etc’ but he also remarked that they gave him ‘no high pleasure as works of art’. Hoppner, more brutally, found even her way with ...”

“... Block Mask author – Hammett wrote his last book, The Thin Man, the same year – and Chandler took his place. Since he wrote slowly and deliberately he barely made a living from his fiction. It was only six years later, with The Big Sleep, his first novel and the first appearance of Marlowe, that he and Cissy could afford to move to the house where they ...”

“... the ‘politics of mana’ which characterised the aggressive competitiveness of iwi culture, they took initiatives in greeting the new forces brought by the Europeans and appropriating them to their own perceived needs. They took to farming, trading, gunpowder and literacy, including Biblical Christianity; they set up an ...”

“... the rule of law, was Alfredo Stroessner’s regime in Paraguay in the 1960s and 1970s, which took the logic of the state of exception to an absurd, still unsurpassed extreme. Under Stroessner, Paraguay was – with regard to its Constitutional order – a ‘normal’ parliamentary democracy with all freedoms guaranteed; however, since, as Stroessner ...”