“... Montaigne. To the bonfire with William Hazlitt, closely followed by Max Beerbohm, Sainte-Beuve and John Aubrey. A brusque kiss-off to Francis Bacon, Charles Lamb, La Bruyère and the best of Mencken, not to mention Svetonius’s Lives of the Caesars; and into the garbage goes Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, perhaps the finest book of profile-essays ever ...”

“... and competing political tendencies; between little Englanders (such as Richard Cobden and John Bright) on the one hand and chauvinist imperialists (such as Lord Palmerston and Joseph Chamberlain) on the other; between a maritime and peaceful trading nation and a military-imperial superpower; between a petit-bourgeois electorate, fired by the ...”

“... is why Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are read all over the world while Pushkin, despite the efforts of John Fennell, Antony Wood. DM. Thomas and Vladimir Nabokov, remains primarily a writer for readers of Russian. The myriad imperfections of rendering in any translation of a novel do not seriously impede what looks like genuine literary enjoyment: we weep for Anna ...”

“... It has been an influential cult novel: the Beats imitated its breathless style; Bob Dylan’s ‘Masters of War’ (1963) is clearly based on the tub-thumping final chapter. It was turned down by Hollywood studios 17 times, on the grounds that it was ‘too depressing’; Buñuel was set to direct it in 1965 but the funding collapsed. When Trumbo himself ...”

“... against evils, and perhaps there is no easier business,’ Trollope said of the anti-slavery MP John Bright, a theatrical orator who couldn’t be bothered with political detail. Celebrating the Civil War as a triumph of freedom over slavery is equally easy. A few decades ago, US historians tried to complicate this heroic narrative. Guided at times by ...”

“... first part of this article comes from the journal. In addition to interviewing Victor Pasmore and John Piper, whose art he admires, although with qualifications, Fuller has interviewed Anthony Caro on his work for, and relationship with Henry Moore, although he believes that Caro has done great damage to British sculpture. In the fourth issue he prints Grey ...”

“... moment was perhaps the publication, while Skinner was an undergraduate, of a scholarly edition of John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government by Peter Laslett. Laslett showed how radically Locke’s text had been misunderstood because of the ignorance of political scientists about, and their indifference to, the circumstances and aims of its ...”

“... like Swift’s Gulliver, would make of today’s Americans. Delegated by God to be the masters of the universe, convinced of their moral superiority, they find it easy to slaughter both the guilty and the innocent with no remorse and continue to maintain, despite all the evidence, that there is no relation between cause and effect. Even stranger is ...”

“... straw sun hats for horses, strappers who specialised in vigorous grooming, ostlers at inns, riding masters, horsebreakers and common or garden grooms. In the same way that the horse left its mark on the titles of the aristocracy of Europe, the Ritters, Cabelleros and Chevaliers, so it marked the surnames of the ordinary man: the ...”

“... he hadn’t actually been able to finish Gaddis’s JR; he preferred the Brontës. He found new masters. From Proust he learned to let a story extend slowly over long stretches of time. From Edith Wharton, that a ‘good way to write a book is to define a character by what he or she wants’ – something that hadn’t occurred to him before. His sentences ...”

“... this: an 1886 lettter from Kipling (21 and still a journalist in India) to Crofts, one of his old masters at Westward Ho!; a scatter of references in letters to his son John at school (c. 1912) about avoiding chaps who engage in ‘beastliness’; a 1917 letter to an unidentified friend about the friend’s son (or ...”

“... had uprooted the blacks from their native culture, then sold parents and children to different masters. The historian Stanley Elkins darkened the picture by comparing slavery to the Holocaust. Like European Jews in the Nazi concentration camps, the American blacks had been so traumatised by the loss of all their old ‘family and kinship arrangements ...”

“... the act’ is fine. Indeed, ‘we might see Bloom as a proper hero of sexual modernity for, since Masters and Johnson, masturbation has become a familiar index of sexual normality, or, as one historian puts it, “the ultimate criterion of correct social behaviour”.’ (The historian, I learn a hundred pages later, is Paul Robinson.) Brown won’t leave ...”

“... At school, children were exposed from an early age to the letters of Cicero and other classical masters. Those nervous or incapable of writing like this, could, as Richardson had discovered to his profit early in his publishing career, purchase volumes of model letters in English, replete with flourishes and sentiments often alien to the sender, but part ...”

“... lunching and drinking) when she joined the agency in the 1970s. Perhaps they really were masters of disguise. Or, more likely, they were just saying what the wiser heads in the British government wanted to hear, committed as they were to decolonisation, ill able to afford many more costly counter-insurgencies like Malaya and Kenya, and only too ...”