“... even libertarians, who think that there should be no politically imposed limits on what people may retain of what they gain without force or fraud, believe in the equal right to exert oneself in the market and not to be taxed. Those who think that more effortful or productive or responsible work deserves higher rewards think that this principle should be ...”

“... to 1326; so these neighbours had no historical claims to Bosnia at all. Some Serbs and Croats may now claim that Bosnia is an artificial entity, but the fact is that its core lands have been together consistently, and calling themselves Bosnia, since the 13th and 14th centuries: first as an independent state, next as a recognised unit in the Ottoman ...”

“... I? Reader, I was bewitched. A dull pre-dinner drink-stop had been entirely transformed. You may have forgotten, but the regnant left-liberal idiocy of the period had it that Thatcher was a shrill, suburban and narrow housewife, the outcome of a spasm of folly among the Tory back-benchers. Unsound, unelectable, extreme ... shouldn’t be long now before ...”

“... and a good housewife’. In other words, Carrington is open to the idea that Kipling’s version may be intensely subjective – not the same thing as a lie – but this openness does not send him off into Seymour-Smithian suppositions about Harry Holloway, the son, ‘doing things’ to Kipling at night or about the depiction of Auntie Rosa (Mrs ...”

“... from extreme depression is something which we can reasonably believe. The word ‘depression’ may cause the reader to pause. We need, as it were, to shake ourselves in order to be clear in our minds that the richly learned word ‘melancholy’ could be used to refer to anything as simply distressing, as unglamorously desolate as depression. To be ...”

“... his assumption that the people would naturally do what the nobility told them. The assumption may surprise those historians who describe 17th-century England as a country ridden with class hatred, but 1688 bore it out. John Miller’s Seeds of Liberty, although emphasising the dependence of the Revolution on its acceptance by a broad and well-informed ...”

“... are in the pictures; the accompanying text is workmanlike, informative and plain. ‘Children may not alter,’ say the authors, ‘but their expectations may do so,’ and, no doubt, by the early Victorian period, knowing young readers were looking askance at the nursery homilies tolerated by the previous ...”

“... and enriched by his autodidactic efforts on the epistles of St Paul, some of which lost endeavour may survive as a residue in the Annotationes. Throughout this time, while he was becoming familiar with the Greek text underlying the received Latin version, his aim was not to edit the Greek, but to revise the familiar Vulgate. He compared the Vulgate, not only ...”

“... opinion, some of the worst sins into which women’s poetry was likely to fall: The verse may have been garbled ... the texture of the whole blurred and uneven, but there is still a glimmer of something more than prolixity and conventionality, the track of an intense, unhealthy inner life, the spurious mysticism of love. L.E.L. served this false creed ...”

“... for the popular stage, it raised public expectations for a genre that did not yet exist. Wister may have pioneered the ritual shoot-out and popularised the Code of the West but the work that established the Western narrative was Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage, published a decade later, which transformed the chivalrous cowboy-gunfighter into the ...”

“... plaque in the Père Lachaise cemetery. The narrator looks at a photo left there, and thinks it may represent ‘one of the other dead young men’. A few pages later, recalling his seemingly interminable early sexual adventures, he says: ‘I suppose most of them are dead now, all those young bodies I touched and undressed and tucked in when they fell ...”

“... it. It belongs to a now familiar narrative of Empire, in which the lowering of the Union Jack may not always be a happy ending, but is at least a satisfyingly inevitable one. In a recent reply to Clementi, the Hong Kong poet Leung Ping Kwan (in John Minford’s translation) resists the urge to gloat and tempers anger with ruefulness: That rhapsodic ...”

“... I usually do is get two or three months’ research under my belt before I go to see the guy. He may say: ‘I don’t want this biography.’ I say to him: ‘That is not one of your options. This book is going to be written, I have a publisher and I’m getting near being able to write something. Your two options are you co-operate with me or you ...”

“... can come up with ‘O Grandfather, Real Spunk’. This is not incorporated into the production. 13 May. Colin H. and I are chatting on the pavement when a man comes past wheeling a basket of shopping. ‘Out of the way, you so-called intellectuals,’ he snarls, ‘blocking the fucking way.’ It’s curious that it’s the intellectual that annoys, though it ...”

“... the Duke was more reasonable than he might at first appear about matters of inherited rank. He may have subscribed to the conventional views which identified the Frankish invaders with the original nobility, but unlike his fellow adviser to the Regent, the comte de Boulainvilliers, he did not turn them into a system. The more ancient the lineage the ...”