“... years in that country, after leaving Russia, pushing Spanish Bibles aggressively in hostile, war-torn Roman Catholic territory: the priests and politicians wanted him to take his ‘Jewish books’ away. The Bible in Spain was a great hit with the militant churchgoers of Britain. But then Borrow’s publisher persuaded the Protestant hero to attempt ...”

“... do much to still doubts or to fill out the story Macfarlane wants to tell. The casus belli in the war of Macfarlane versus Lawrence Stone, R.H. Tawney, Rodney Hilton, George Homans, Christopher Hill, C.H. Wilson, C.B. Macpherson (and long-dead greats such as Tocqueville, Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Tonnies) is his answer to the question of why fully-fledged ...”

“... shored up a potent popular nationalism which, unharnessed, might easily have recoiled on the class-state that had ridden it to victory in 1815. Burke sensed this possibility acutely and devoted his efforts to stabilising the old spirit of tumult and insurrection. As he understood, more was required than success and foreign conquests to fasten it in ...”

“... that would have dismayed many of her admirers. She didn’t live in Brompton with her upper-middle-class (though poor) parents, but in Chelsea. After her father died in 1824, the money she made by her writing supported both her mother and her brother. Yet she appeared quite carefree, adopting romantic dress and seeming to pay little regard to how immodest or ...”

“... well in the 1930s, but whose development, as MacNeice explains in a note, ‘is interrupted by the war . . . Subsequent interruptions and frustrations include those occasioned by the lure of commercial art, by drink, money troubles and women.’ Hence the title of the play. Hank (an anagram of Khan) might have built a stately pleasure dome, but instead he ...”

“... Frogs shows Dionysus going to Hades to fetch him back after his death; Athenian prisoners-of-war in Sicily are said to have got food and water from their captors by singing his songs. Frogs suggests that his magic lay, at least partly, in emotionalism coupled with a new use of the fictional female voice. Bronze Age Greece could not escape Cretan ...”

“... and ‘planning’ movements in Britain and Europe before, during and after the Second World War has suggested that those movements drew their direct inspiration at least as much from the ‘positivist’ legacy of Comte (and his mentor Saint-Simon) as from the more obvious influences of either democratic socialism or Soviet-style Marxism. Some of the ...”

“... was for the miners’ own good, and a testy note about Saddam’s hanging, though nothing on the war. With formidable realism, Desmond is shown to be far more exercised by ‘art-bollocks’, ‘creeping Christmas’, mobile phones, target-driven education, holiday camps, foreign films, Viagra spam – a bumper edition of Grumpy Old Men, in other words. But ...”

“... took me the best part of a locked-down month to get through Symbolic Forms – it is longer than War and Peace – and while I was constantly impressed by Cassirer’s scope, lucidity and command of detail, I felt starved of brilliance, insight and rigour. It was disappointing to find that Cassirer makes no attempt to explain why his three grand categories ...”

“... Political Justice went off like a bomb in the heightened atmosphere of 1790s Britain, at war with revolutionary France and with a government intensely suspicious of radical activity at home. ‘No work in our time gave such a blow,’ Hazlitt recalled. ‘Tom Paine was considered for the time as a Tom Fool to him.’ The book was exorbitantly ...”

“... of analogies – from Yuri Gagarin’s spaceflight to a Chris Marker documentary about the Pacific War and Dickens’s A Christmas Carol – to help her navigate the territory. Some are more successful than others, but they all expose the doubleness of Chilean society in a period when life could be either peaceful or extremely dangerous, depending on who you ...”

“... mean better quality control and a higher chance of delivery. Even (or especially) now, the brand war is fierce: on the black market, one can of Coca Cola will get you three cabbages, or five eggs, or five rolls of toilet paper, or two AA batteries, while a Pepsi will get you nothing.Residents of compounds without resources and purchasing power have to rely ...”

“... pervades this autobiography, as it proceeds from an account of Eysenck’s boyhood in post-World War One Germany, through his flight to England out of repugnance at Hitler, and sub-sequent rapid rise as a psychologist. His earliest conscious memory is of winning the judge’s admiration in a seaside sandcastle competition, and the second is of his ...”

“... central focus and aspires to reinterpret them. Hilary Mantel’s evidently falls into the second class, her protagonists being Danton, Robespierre and Camille Desmoulins, together with Desmoulins’s wife Lucile. Out of her novelist’s imagination she has lavishly furnished these personages with passions and motives and emotional entanglements; and since ...”

“... Fascists, the exhibition plays down the dominating presence of Communists in the arts since the war. Rather than all that Sironi, there might have been more of Guttuso. His attempt to create an epic art in a demotic language was one of the bravest enterprises in modern painting, and its failures are rarely uninteresting. Guttoso’s pictures here all date ...”