“... twice offered him the throne? After finishing Margaret FitzHerbert’s excellent book the reader may be in two minds; at least King Aubrey would have wielded the sceptre with more panache than Lord Rothermere on the throne of Hungary. Herbert was the son of the fourth Earl of Carnarvon. His half-brother, the fifth Earl, was the co-finder of Tutankhamen’s ...”

“... A hundred or so pages further on, she suggests that Beardsley’s ‘iridescent interests’ may have ‘enlarged his stature’. What’s more, she describes A Book of Fifty Drawings (1897) as a monument to the 24-year-old Beardsley’s ‘iridescence and growth’. She could scarcely have found a more inept word to harp on in a biography of an artist ...”

“... Chardin, Fragonard and David, although they are surely artists of equal stature: and much the same may be said of many other periods. Sculpture loses more in electric light and in photographic reproduction than paintings do, but long before these inventions it was observed that a real taste for it was less ‘diffused among the mass of mankind’ than a taste ...”

“... they saw much that was good in the “old ways”.’ She does mention the effect of what may be called the beginnings of press criticism and the growing influence of the Nonconformists, who were effectively if not legally barred from attendance at Oxford and Cambridge, the attraction of Bible criticism and the paramount importance of the earth ...”

“... Wright brothers, and all the hand-shaking and banquets in their honour when they visited London in May 1909 were merely a guise by the Liberal Administration to avoid further criticism from Northcliffe and the Air League. ‘In this way the first chapter of a novel phase of British life came to an end, in ...”

“... an unconscious.’ We don’t know how Huston reacted to dialogue of this degree of awfulness: he may even have liked it. The film he eventually made – Freud: A Secret Passion – and the films he has made since – Under the Volcano, for example – show that he is a sucker for windy portentousness. Perhaps the lines sounded less windy in 1959 than they do ...”

“... to look at things in the right way is identified as the radical task of the moral life. So it may seem ironic that the novels which embody and explore this insight should themselves be so difficult to see. Uncertainty about what has happened in the book, and what it’s to be taken to mean, is a usual response to a new Murdoch novel. The scope for ...”

“... of a single Peruvian life with the chronic mismanagement and distempers of Peru. As narrative, it may be complicatedly told, with much canny transiting between present and past, but the formal ingenuities work to the one end, of delivering a full and unhappy report on the way things have been or are in the novelist’s homeland. Outwardly, the story is a ...”

“... the text with precision. Ms Greer, whose way of saying ‘I’ is ‘the present writer’, may be addressing this soporific text to a scholarly (or at least a pedantic) readership rather than a general one. Neither are the illustrations (32 in colour plus 161 in black-and-white) likely to allure general readers by means of lust of the eye. It is not ...”

“... High German … ’ The former is also for the convenience of Everyman, for whom the dictionary may be his sole reference book. Combining the dictionary and the encyclopedia is no new idea (Cockeram did it in 1623), and the distinction between the two types of information is by no means as clear as conventional wisdom would have it. Indeed, it is least ...”

“... on this day or that, or awaiting the birth of the Shiloh to the 65-year-old Joanna Southcott. It may be that some variety of myth concerning the End is necessary to everybody, but there can be no doubt that the forms of it that have prevailed in our culture were established by the Bible – by Daniel, Revelation, and the ‘little apocalypse’ of Mark and ...”

“... in living standards – ‘Now there appears to be but one order of people, a middle Class as they may be called’ (Tuesday, 14 September) – while deploring the general lack of decorum. Madame Récamier comes in for censure on the low cut of her dress. There are also revealing accounts of major artistic and political personalities, including a description ...”

“... that that person stole the jewels: that is to say, he knows that something, and this knowledge may indeed be a species of belief. The grammars of ‘know’ and ‘believe’ are indeed different, but more than that is needed to lead one to this sort of conclusion about knowledge and belief. Other arguments in the book are just too blunt and brisk. One of ...”

“... untestable and therefore unacceptable premise. For although the relationships that such historians may reveal, or claim to reveal for example, between economic status and artistic taste – are themselves amenable to testing, the idea that a relationship of some kind must exist between such diverse phenomena is no more than an article of faith. It need hardly ...”

“... is a book for the specialists of the Dorothy L. Sayers Historical and Literary Society. Others may note that Trevor Hall isn’t quite reliable off his own subject: a poem by T. S. Eliot that he says ‘was not reprinted elsewhere so far as I am aware’ was indeed reprinted, and not only in the Collected Poems. If John Buchan, in spite of his ...”