“... of dead animals. Turning sheep and calves into parchment is a messy, smelly business. But when we read medieval texts in print editions all that mess disappears – so we no longer see what the authors of the Middle English ‘Charters of Christ’ saw when they compared God’s sacrificial Lamb to the lambs that supplied their writing material. As the Word ...”

“... the same pleasure in small fact as Pym’s diaries. How commonplace it would be if all we could read about in that diary entry was their current books and poems, and how each was getting on with them, and what they thought about literature today. The occasion would not have been memorable. As it is, it is. And largely because of the food. I have wondered ...”

“... out new positions in military service and imperial administration. Several, including the turncoat Benedict Arnold, placed their sons in the East India Company army. Others figured among the many ambitious, hard-up men who accepted positions as doctors, lawyers or secretaries in distant parts. Within a generation, there was little to distinguish these American ...”

“... gaining ground behind the scenes. Norman Bryson, in a work which will necessarily be much less read, entirely bypasses this particular interpretation, but substitutes a new one of his own which is, in part, dependent on changing views of Dutch art of the 17th century. Very briefly, the changes can be summarised as follows. The comfortable households, the ...”

“... middle. These are aphorisms, after all; each one has its own plot. And it is truly exhilarating to read Kraus in full form, even on the subject of old Vienna. He is amazed that ‘even jealous men allow their wives to mingle freely at masked balls. They have forgotten how much they could once permit themselves there with other men’s wives, and believe that ...”

“... Sir Edmund Mortimer and Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, into the rebellion. He wrote to Pope Benedict XIII, exiled in Avignon, seeking approval for a plan to restore Welsh law and to elevate the Welsh Church to an archdiocese that would appoint suffragan bishops to Exeter, Bath, Worcester, Lichfield and Hereford. No more English visitors. But the Welsh ...”

“... examined parcels of posted books in their office in Parnell Square sometimes took them home to be read at greater leisure. This arrangement had the advantage that a man could ‘ask his wife for an opinion in a particularly doubtful case’. The role of the customs in censorship was one which ‘just grew’. In addition to regular staff, vigilantes were ...”

“... of detailed information while seeming to represent each essay as a short story. His writing can be read as an attempt to close the gap between historical scholarship and belles-lettres. Haskell, however, can seem unwilling to contemplate the fact that at some point the narrative must stop, if a piece of writing is to become the ‘essay’ he claims it to ...”

“... to the cover, the people inside were real: Mick Kelly, who heard music in the inner room; Dr Benedict Mady Copeland, a black Marxist dying of tuberculosis who thought continually of the advancement of his people; Biff Brannon, the brusque owner of the New York Café, who sometimes wished he were a mother; the deaf-mute Singer with his flying hands. How ...”

“... Yorker, have welcomed the talents of John McGahern, Seamus Heaney, Brian Friel, Edna O’Brien and Benedict Kiely, among others, one could give long odds against a manuscript by an unknown Irish novelist or poet seeing the light of first publication in Boston or in New York.So it’s back to London and the old Anglo-Irish alliance. As we Irish were England’s ...”

“... Sturluson’s Heimskringla, long kept in print by Everyman but made by someone who could not read Old Norse. Borman’s best source is Orderic Vitalis’s Historia Ecclesiastica. This was completed before 1141, and was written by someone who knew Matilda at least at second-hand, for though English by birth, Orderic was a monk at the Norman monastery of ...”

“... return to a timeless origin, the reclaiming of a land that had been lost. Modern civic nations, as Benedict Anderson identified, are conceived as ‘a solid community moving steadily down (or up) history’. The Brexitist conviction that there is no knowable future is symptomatic of a more widespread collapse in what we might think of as the political ...”

“... unfamiliar through use. He had discovered a new sense: a spatial awareness that enabled him to read the hidden flows of the metropolis like a Polynesian seafarer following ocean paths otherwise traced only by the wind. He was so persuasive that when I got home from the party I ordered a compass for my own bike. With it, I imagined, I too would become an ...”

“... 27 December 1949, more than four years after Sukarno, the leader of the nationalist movement, had read out the ‘Proklamasi Kemerdekaan Indonesia’ – a declaration of independence.Van Reybrouck is best known as the author of Congo: The Epic History of a People, which established a template for his lively works of history based on extensive interviews. Van ...”

“... here, and his collection offers helpful accounts of influential thinkers such as Richard Rorty, Benedict Anderson and the radical-turned-Neo-Conservative historian Eugene Genovese, as well as thoughtful reviews of significant debates, such as the contested legacy of Darwin (Stephen Jay Gould v. sociobiology), the stake of revisionist histories of the 1960s ...”