“... For Professor Jacques Le Goff, it is a clue which helps us to understand the 12th century a little better. Le Goff, whose collected essays, written between 1956 and 1976, and published in French in 1977, have just made their appearance in English, is one of the liveliest and most stimulating historians at work in France today – no small praise at a ...”

“... the visual arts. In these years, moreover, he remained ignorant about his own country, and he made little effort to increase his knowledge of the Empire or to keep it up to date. Having left India, after a flying visit, a few days before his 26th birthday, he declined to return. ‘There is much news of Anglo-India in my life,’ he wrote in July 1899: ‘it ...”

“... not only a distinguished academic economist but a former civil servant who knows the Treasury’s little ways. They have adopted a straightforward division of labour. Dr Burk is responsible for Part One of the book; Sir Alec for Part Two. Part One is a close account of the various crises of 1976, the decision to seek the assistance of the International ...”

“... apply to many of them (consider the bourgeois dictatorship of Napoleon III), while it makes little sense to say that the populist Nazis held aristocratic values and beliefs. Nevertheless, in the 1970s and 1980s this idea of modern German history swept all before it. As late as 1987, a doctoral dissertation at Bielefeld University on the Nazi policy of ...”

“... the sea nymph Thetis to the Argo, the first ever craft to enter water; also (fast-forwarding a little) to Theseus, who sails his own craft to and from Crete to kill the Minotaur, the sea’s monstrous offspring; and, finally, to Ariadne, whom Theseus abandons on Naxos on his way home, leaving her to while away her time by orgying with Bacchus. Steven ...”

“... aluminium business, a cornerstone of the Mellon fortune, was, Andrew later admitted, managed by Arthur Vining Davis: ‘You might say that he was practically the whole business.’ Gulf Oil was overseen by one of Andrew’s nephews. The banking businesses were controlled jointly by Andrew and Dick, but they were advised by a succession of highly talented ...”

“... the old castle above it in a cup in the hills with the mountains beyond, brown mountains with a little green on their slopes. Both writers, as it happens, are writing about Italy. Both writers use one word three times (‘green’ for Hemingway, ‘primroses’ for Lawrence), and repeat two other words. Hemingway’s passage is static. He is ...”

“... when talent and privilege meet. This book has several faults but at least one great merit: Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale have seen that Misia’s personality, even if it can never quite be captured, remains highly interesting for the light it casts on how talent can cohabit with gracious living and yet still keep its distance. Misia features a good ...”

“... steeples rose around the country, so medieval-sounding names crowded around the font: Arthur, Walter, Harold and Neville, Ethel, Edith and Dorothy, soon to be supplemented by endless Geoffreys. This remarkable efflorescence has been described as a ‘personalisation’ of names, although since in this period the ‘proper’ name one gave to ...”

“... him. In writing of such things, how ever, he shied away from the sexual suggestiveness of Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan and The Three Impostors. His innocent eye looked always for the whimsical, the curious, the charming; nothing he wrote in this kind has the creepiness of the best Machen. Whimsicality and conscious charm mark his first ...”

“... like that of his creations, is of a gaseous nature. Max Beerbohm once wrote a memorable little sketch of a visit to the Sage of Box Hill, and of hearing Meredith’s voice addressing the air as he approached, and recommencing the conversation as he walked away. In mid-century Meredith dazzled his friends and public, but the bubble eventually ...”

“... Aristotle’s conception of poetic truth was one in which correspondence with reality played little part, and his biology gave an account of what he thought ought to be true in the light of his deep conception of the true purposes of nature. Thus it ought to be true according to the hebdomadal rule that male semen is infertile between the ages of seven ...”

“... might mean, and what their advantages might be, these snippets of information can be of little use to the candidate. And nowhere is there the vaguest hint that some boards also allow the study of texts outside the canon which is outlined in the remainder of the book. It is quite possible that the author does not consider these choices to be ...”

“... it stemming from Immanuel Kant – a man who spent his life in a backwater of East Prussia, cared little for the arts, and knew very little about them. His Critique of Judgment says what is, in Carey’s words, ‘patently untrue’, namely that the beautiful may be so called only if the speaker believes that everybody else ...”

“... stood from the green jungle carpet, browning at the top like cauliflowers. Their trunks curve a little this way and that, giving the appearance of reptilian life.’ So Greene describes it in Congo Journal. It might well have been while running away from these afternoon bores that he imagined the flight of Deo Gratias, Querry’s boy, into the forest at ...”