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“... experience added up to little more than a trundle through the revolving doors of the front hall before moving on to the next stop. Add to that his notorious lack of formal education and you have just about the most improbable political meteor imaginable. So how did he manage it? I suspect that the author of the first of these books would admit that his ...”

“... is the entry for one relatively minor character, Albert Creech: The Jenkinses’ cook (formerly hall-boy to Jenkins’s grandmother) at Stonehurst in 1914: ‘Albert, fleshy, sallow, blue-chinned, breathing hard, sweating a little, fitted an iron bar into sockets ... Rolled shirt-sleeves, green baize apron, conferred a misleadingly businesslike ...”

“... of spin’, have had much claim to democratic plausibility. One was Herbert Morrison, Peter Mandelson’s grandfather, now best remembered for the Festival of Britain. Well before then he ran the LCC in the Thirties, presiding over a coalition of trades-unionists and educated Hampstead women with Blairite discipline and Tammany-...”

“... Upon Don Quixote and Rhenanus’s adaptation of Tom-kis’s Lingua) and illustrations (the elder Peter Breughel’s Mascarade D’Ourson et de Valentin as well as the younger’s Village Fair), so that the old points emerge with new emphasis. The second half of the book gives critical readings of The Spanish Tragedy, Mucedorus, Edward II, Dr Faustus and ...”

“... into the open. The opponent is Jan Kott, who wrote Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1967), and the Peter Brook production (1970) which dramatised his findings. I take my stand beside the other old buffers here. Kott is ridiculously indifferent to the letter of the play and labours to befoul its spirit. And yet the Victorian attitude to it also feels ...”

“... of paintings and drawings; Claudia Stumpf deals with the ‘Expedition into Sicily’ and Peter Funnell with the more general critical writings: A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus, An Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste (1805), and An Inquiry into the Symbolical Language of Ancient Art and Mythology (1818). Individually the chapters are ...”

“... that ‘raison d’état can never be humanitarian.’ Zehrer’s prewar writing is discussed in Peter Köpf’s Schreiben nach jeder Richtung (1995) about the postwar West German press. Berghahn, however, doesn’t mention this book, and indeed seems almost completely ignorant of previous work in his field. He fails to overturn the verdict of another ...”

“... can be visited by appointment: I recall spending an afternoon a few years ago in the mote-filled hall of the University of Montpellier’s junk room, examining one of the famous series of wax impressions of syphilitic buboes and chancres from the 19th century. Montpellier’s anatomy tradition goes back to 1315, when the body would be opened for inspection ...”

“... ideas while obscuring his overt possession of them. That he chooses to read a fiction in a lecture hall rather than a lecture enables him to pose the unspeakable instead of talking about the impossibility of speaking it. Last year he and I took part in a conference in Holland on the problem of evil. The participants fumbled around with the primary grotesquerie ...”

“... which no longer came to Scott. Many are in Yorkshire, where churches like the ‘bare-style’ St Peter, Barnsley marry strength with grace as masterfully as anything by Scott. An obituarist of Temple Moore claimed that he ‘summed up and completed the theory of the Gothic Revival’. That was to forget Sir Giles, who started to learn architecture from Moore ...”

“... what a mournful middle-class qualifier! – that ‘the show was a success: the suburban hall was almost three-quarters full.’ Pandit Rasraj, an eminent singer approaching the end of the ‘relatively brief period’ when a classical musician’s ‘creative powers and his visibility coincide’, is described as entering the ‘second phase, of ...”

“... late 19th century. In the years following the McNaughton case Britain entered ‘an age when music-hall hypnotists and salon mesmerists brought before the public a frightening display of individuals pursuing physical ends not of their own choosing. In the courtroom these cultural anomalies were supplied by sleepwalkers, automatons and a new variation on an old ...”

“... players, while thinking of Oxford. She does so, Wade points out, from a room which her suitor, Peter Wimsey, never enters: this is the domain of an independent woman. The plot shows a variety of women being thwarted by family or communal life: wife, don, novelist, servant. The names are a tease. Although a lord, Wimsey is intellectually astringent; Vane ...”

“... in Dallas ran a conference in November. Nor is More much celebrated outside academia and St Peter’s. The fate of the Romanov obelisk in Moscow’s Alexander Garden, first put up in 1914 to mark the tercentenary of the dynasty, is illustrative. Bolsheviks re-engraved the obelisk with More’s name and other mooted harbingers of communism. In 2013, 99 ...”

“... pioneering work of Samuel Johnson, and rival the efforts of 19th-century European lexicographers. Peter Gilliver, in The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (2016), characterises the movement that led to the formalisation of the Philological Society’s proposals as ‘a groundswell of what might be called lexicographic nationalism’, and the OED has ...”