“... with European and American views and evidence. By attending to very different histories, we may understand our own better. The place to begin seems to be the sheer fact that these literary histories exist. There are no contemporary counterparts in English about English or American literature. We have seen histories of the Elizabethan theatre audience or ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... paintings fall somewhere between the diagram (which can give information about the thing which may or may not relate to how it looks) and the photograph, which gives information about how it looks and may or may not give information about what it ...”

“... those discourses refer (or worse, the rejection of the very idea that facts exist or that one may refer to them).This is quite a programme, and undertaken here in an oddly roundabout way, since Sokal and Bricmont have chosen to take on the influential Parisians they regard as a prime source of the infection, rather than their infatuated surrogates on the ...”

“... to obviate identification. Here is the chance for New York’s homeliest girl. Her misfortune may make a fortune right away. Somewhere in the archives of the Mirror, a masked Rosa Travers gazes out in muted triumph. Some time later, the new-model Rosa would, I suppose, have been unveiled. Unless the carbolic acid caused a third-degree burn, the scalpel ...”

“... who thought her a pedantic elaborator on natural scenery. By a few critics – whose vocabulary may have been less extensive than her own – she was resentfully branded an élitist poet, one whose poetry was not ‘accessible’ to the ordinary reader. Clampitt was aware of this criticism but put it gracefully by: ‘There are enough readers who get turned ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... society, is entranced by, yet impatient with, the world of his grandparents, whose ancien régime may be represented by the Illustrated London News. He takes one of the great lines of English poetry and impatiently speeds it up, pragmatically recasting it in terms of his own inheritance: ‘They’re all gone into a world of light; the farm’s my own.’ For ...”

“... world wars. Is the Kadavergehorsam explanation adequate? That depends on what we want to know. It may tell us why German soldiers fought on tenaciously even when the war was self-evidently lost, or why economic life continued to function even under severe aerial bombardment. It may explain individual atrocities, such as the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Man, said Aristotle, is a political animal; it is his nature to live in a state. Men and women may live in political communities, modern liberals have retorted, but there’s nothing particularly political in the nature or character of most people. In every society there are some who have a taste for politics, some who want to be rulers or representatives; but they are a tiny minority ...”

“... that great but mysterious poem, Wordsworth describes himself walking out on a moist, brilliant May morning. He is about to experience one of the numinous encounters for which he is famous – with another solitary walker, a derelict old man who makes his living gathering leeches from moorland ponds. Before that, his pleasure in the beauty of nature darkens ...”

“... realm, is also a ‘delphic’ oracle, perhaps, looking towards a future when women as well as men may have the freedom to act both morally and according to their feelings; and when they will not be prevented from shaping their own destiny or shaping the world. As the story progresses through its historical time, signs of such a future begin to appear. Divorce ...”