“... they are all decent men and women,” I thought, as I paid my bill at the garage; and then with self-pity added, ‘Who knows if it is any worse here than everywhere else?” ’ There are some good stories in Visitors Book. I was already familiar with Robert Bernen’s ‘Tales From the Bluestacks’, his evocations of a ...”

“... as he looks.’ But he was a living repository of nostalgia, and of the most stylish sort of self-pity; and these, if properly served up, can be a potent ingredient of literary popularity. Everyone has something to look back on, and to be sorry for themselves about; and Connolly acted as a focal point for the regrets and frustrations of his literary ...”

“... from America? Advocates of the ‘natural transfer’ hypothesis, including Luc Montagnier and Robert Gallo, credited as the discoverers of HIV, have assumed that Aids was an old disorder which became subject to the medical gaze only when Westerners were affected. And how had that come about? A disease long contained within certain isolated Central African ...”

“... of the religiously pluralistic world in which we now live. His interest in excavating evidence of self-professed atheists stands in counterpoint to Lucien Febvre’s celebrated claim that unbelief (l’incroyance) was a philosophical and logical impossibility in the 16th century. The long shadow cast by Febvre’s thesis has not only inhibited serious ...”

“... In both cases the faces seem to look inward – painfully (in the case of Kollwitz) or in stolid self-defence (in the case of Evans). Kollwitz insists that you feel; Evans presents faces which don’t offer the connections with a painterly tradition of facial expression that more formal or overtly poetic photographs would. Although less obviously so than ...”

“... our interest and the writer’s feelings. Gray’s later experiments with bardic odes and self-conscious ‘fragments’ may have qualified him to be considered a proto-Romantic in some sketches of poetical history, but Wordsworth was right to think of him at ‘the head’ of an alien poetical culture. Gray loved poetic diction, as well as scholarly ...”

“... in Egypt and Algeria, anti-abortion activists in America and the Jewish groups who inhabit the self-imposed ghettos of Meir Shearim in Jerusalem or try to sabotage the Palestinian peace process. Kepel concludes that all such movements have arisen ‘in a world that has lost the assurance born of scientific and technical progress since the Fifties. Just as ...”

“... height of the neo-Jacobitism [sic], a Romantic-Decadent movement which reacted against cynical and self-interested influences in … contemporary politics’. No wonder it was still going. From Wikipedia I learned that it was one of the less militant groups to have revered the martyr-king at that time: in 1893, a ‘considerable detachment of police’, sent ...”

“... and designed in one. ‘My Marilyn’ (1965). Hamilton explored the new relay between self and image directly in his own version of the ultimate Pop icon, Marilyn Monroe, made after his first visit to the United States in 1963, where he travelled with his friend Marcel Duchamp, and met Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Ed Ruscha and other young bucks ...”

“... that truancy is good and that the rules are good. ‘The most beautiful thing in the world,’ Robert Frost wrote in his Notebooks, ‘is conflicting interests when both are good.’ Someone with a truant mind believes that conflict is the point, not the problem. The job of the truant mind is to keep conflict as alive as possible, which means that ...”

“... but with a thesis’; ‘this biography does useful service, but not much more.’ His self-assessments could be equally brusque: ‘I exaggerate a little, but not outrageously’ – this in an essay entitled ‘Is Michael Neve paranoid?’, a question that answers itself, though the piece answers a different question, about the history of the ...”

“... In April​ 1970, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick – both aged 53, married for 21 years – had just been on holiday together in Italy with their 13-year-old daughter, Harriet. Hardwick and Harriet had come home to New York, where Hardwick taught at Barnard College; Lowell had gone to Oxford to take up a fellowship at All Souls ...”

“... shipwreck, showmanship, early death – also bring to mind the life and career of Robert Louis Stevenson, another Scottish writer who looked at human adventure as a brand of metaphysics. Nowadays, people with a heart for proper adventure (or ‘extreme sports’) like to load themselves with equipment and dive into the ocean looking for ...”

“... of Lord of Appeal in Ordinary to ensure that only real judges would sit in future. That it was, in Robert Stevens’s words in the Dickson and Carmichael volume, ‘the work of a group of right-wing Tory MPs who cared nothing for law, the courts or litigants, but were anxious to prop up the hereditary principle by creating a group of judges who might balance ...”

“... slaves’ complicity in their own wretchedness, critics denounced Roll, Jordan, Roll, along with Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman’s Time on the Cross, which claimed that slavery was a rational, profitable, even materially beneficial institution not only for masters but for slaves as well. Roll, Jordan, Roll might not have won Genovese much gratitude from ...”