“... came naturally to Boswell, less naturally but effectively in the sentences of Adam Smith and David Hume, but at the cost of the reservation of the Scottish tongue for casual, domestic or low-life use. Yet, as Daiches reminds us, with an exceptionally happy choice of quotations, the literary endeavours of the upper class were accompanied by a genuine ...”

“... makes me think of Chekhov.’ The books have sold more than half a billion copies. I’d say that means Simenon achieved all his ambitions. Being a writer, he was completely miserable about that.As you’d expect, there have been many translations of Maigret into English. The project is not straightforward, as we can see just from looking at the titles. These ...”

“... images on a wide range of writers and critics in the first three decades of the 20th century. As David Trotter notes in Cinema and Modernism,* his account of the impact of film on Woolf, Joyce and Eliot, critics have tended to associate modernist literature with montage, a term used by Russian film-makers of the 1920s to indicate a quick succession of ...”

“... Michael Schmidt’s lives of the Poets is not at all like Johnson’s. Indeed, it is by no means certain that Schmidt has taken the trouble to investigate the famous works of his precursor. He seems to think that Johnson’s poets wrote in the 18th century (some did; some didn’t) and that Johnson himself chose his subjects (only four of ...”

“... can be avoided, Northern Ireland will continue to follow some single-market rules. This implicitly means putting in place what Boris Johnson had categorically ruled out: border checks. ‘We can do a deal without checks on the Irish border,’ he declared a year ago. The government has since acknowledged that there will be ‘minimal’ checks. Northern ...”

“... the Laudians were capable of lining up with the supporters of popular merriment. They were by no means consistent in this, and on many occasions, the intensity of their concern with sacrilege led them in the other direction. In Sussex, the aspiring young cricketer who hit a ball through a church window found that Richard Montagu decided to prosecute him for ...”

“... This, more or less, is how Present Times begins, and one thing very quickly becomes clear: David Storey likes compound ...”

“... quality of the switch – almost had me tumbling. Which? Does it mean what it says or say what it means? Does it matter? Carroll says: ‘As she couldn’t answer either question, it didn’t matter much which way she put it.’ Well, it does matter, I think, though I’m not totally sure. One seems to be a category (unfortunately) within the discipline of ...”

“... In​ scope and ambition David Nirenberg’s Anti-Judaism: The History of a Way of Thinking is reminiscent of Edward Said’s Orientalism. Both offer a strident critique of Western civilisation. For Said, the West’s representation of the Orient is an ideological distortion in the service of Western imperialism. The Oriental is the Other against whom the West defines itself and whom it tries to dominate ...”

“... abstraction and rigidity, and there is a Catalan word for it: seny. This untranslatable term means, we are told, something like common sense, or the spirit of compromise, but it is also rendered as wisdom and intelligence, and Temma Kaplan associates it with solidarity. ‘The man of seny,’ we learn from a Catalan writer quoted by Hughes, ‘renounces ...”

“... Like most biographies nowadays, David Nokes’s John Gay is very long, but unlike some of the others it is not much longer than it needed to be. Gay devoted so much of his attention to people grander than himself that his life story can’t be told without allusion to those of more complicated and ambitious figures like Pope, Swift and Addison ...”

“... had rather to be forced to take up arms.’ The shift in the discipline away from military history means that some historians of the period now ignore the Spanish War of Independence altogether. Ronald Fraser’s Napoleon’s Cursed War will not do much to help resolve the debate over the conflict’s significance. The author, best known for an acclaimed oral ...”

“... verse does two things superbly. It captures the mental states of its subjects (which often means their desolation or unhappiness), and it shows us that the ideas and artefacts of modernity which we now take for granted seemed exceedingly strange when they first appeared. A preoccupation with history runs through his work. He has used historical ...”

“... in the region of two million pounds, which made him rich by the standards of the time, but by no means fabulously wealthy. Surprisingly enough, it was during the reign of that most dull, dim and dutiful of monarchs, King George V, that royal tax exemption took off. In 1910, when he was eager to conciliate the new monarch at the time of the constitutional ...”

“... Valentin: You mean one sex inserted into another?Paul Eluard: As you know very well, to make love means to ejaculate.Albert Valentin: What does making love mean? Confused interruptionsAndré Thirion: At present, I love someone: no a priori representation. At other times, I had preferences.Yves Tanguy: I can make love in every way. I prefer ...”