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“... him to the end of his days, it earned him the rank of Lieutenant-General and – the truly vital point – brought him into personal contact with Tsar Alexander for the first time (at Memel in April 1807). The Tsar was impressed by the forthright views of this unknown soldier, and sent his personal surgeon to tend his wounds. After the fresh disaster ...”

“... anti-poetry which almost any literate person could turn out indefinitely. But you communicate no vital experience at all, and express no authentic reaction to your subjects, while your verbalisms are throughout quite appallingly trite and unilluminated by any flash of personal vision or first-hand feeling at all. He was, by this time, well qualified to make ...”

“... best to stay in. What, though, if you were some out-of-order soul who chose to look at this vital encounter from the other end of the pitch? One early cricketer who did so was the third Duke of Dorset: ‘What is human life but a game of cricket? – beauty the bat and man the ball,’ he’s quoted as saying in ...”

“... tells us that is not the truth. Something in Scottie was afraid to commit. So Midge is a vital corrective in this story: try thinking of the film without her and her sense of affection. Scottie is fifty but he seems without sexual experience; he could be a virgin, or a boy who needs looking after. Midge watches him sadly, like a mother who feels her ...”

“... significant industrial and technological advantages over Europe in the manufacture of commodities vital to the development of the global economy, such as tea, silk, porcelain and printed calicoes. After the European economies took off decisively in the 19th century, it became plausible for the first time to propagate the myth of China’s epochal ...”

“... with storytelling (it is the subject of Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and F***ing and the form of David Hare’s Via Dolorosa), as Post-Modernist attempts to deny the validity of narrative give way to a more subtle (and sensible) exploration of how narrative works. The influence that speaks most strongly to today’s Irish dramatists is not that of the turn ...”

“... The preoccupation of the British ruling class with its world-leading financial sector is a vital part of the explanation for the long decay of the 19th-century ascendancy of the North.Yet the question remains: why did something as colossal as the industrial revolution fail to shift the balance of British political power decisively towards industry and ...”

“... such a profusion of data on so many aspects of Mexica history and religion, but leave so many vital strands of evidence in the shadows. For this alone, I am grateful for the opportunity to have read her ...”

“... to identify with victory. De Gaulle was convinced that this picture of a united nation was a vital prerequisite if France was to take its rightful place among the world powers. This desire for national unity was reflected in his government, which, in order to minimise the chance of disruption by the PCF, included four Communist ministers. But de Gaulle ...”

“... of human action and imagination to transform the tragic history of mass displacement into a new, vital history of the dwelling place’ (Kwon is an anthropologist who writes for anthropologists). This is what he sees in the Vietnamese readiness to welcome the ghosts of strangers, presupposing the foundational security of hearth and home, whose assumed fixity ...”

“... In November of the following year he alerted his readers to the absence, in the art of David Hockney, of ‘the spiritual quest at the heart of modernism’. Several years later, in June 1981, he gave warning that the stained canvases of Morris Louis, the leading member of the ‘Washington Colour School’, did not represent the breakthrough that ...”

“... launched a fleet of biographies, editions and collections of his letters over the last century. David Brown’s fine Life is the latest to grapple with Adams’s paradoxes and limitations: his inconsistent ego, his contradictions, his Waspy waspishness. It deals with his reserve and self-consciousness, his reluctance to risk failure, his unconvincing ...”

“... it inspired a rich store of legends about his astonishing feats of magic. As the medievalist David Collins asked, is it Magnus or Magus, Albert the Great or Albert the Magician? Irven Resnick and Kenneth Kitchell, who have long toiled on the Albertian corpus, provide a lively, accessible introduction to his life and thought. Albert joined the Dominican ...”

“... or preacher, dogmatist or poet. On the one hand, there is the marvellous animist, the quick, vital writer of physical descriptions – the poet, say, who sees a kangaroo with its ‘drooping Victorian shoulders’, or a mosquito moving like ‘a dull clot of air’. On the other, there is the preacher, the tiresome Lawrence of hoarse doctrine, the bully ...”

“... false charges. But, at the same time, cordial relations with the force were an integral, indeed a vital, part of underworld life. And although for much of his life he was a threat to law and order, Harding’s political opinions were essentially the conservatism of those who claim to have no politics. Both of these books excel in presenting ‘the real-life ...”