“... than any of their owner’s paintings, which included Leonardo’s Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, to which it would probably be impossible to assign a monetary value today (the Mona Lisa is uninsured for just that reason). And tapestries –‘which seem today to enjoy about the same esteem as secondhand clothing’ – outclassed paintings in the ...”

“... Thus the eventual union of the kingdoms was an odd arrangement negotiated on behalf of Queen Anne as Queen of England with herself as Queen of Scotland. The conventional English understanding of the Union of 1707 is that Scotland was incorporated within the English state by Act of Parliament, and that, in the words of the chief guru of English ...”

“... and a garden designed by Inigo Jones. Denmark House, as Somerset House was called when occupied by Anne of Denmark, had a fountain thirty feet high and eighty feet wide: ‘a huge rocky re-creation of Mount Parnassus’, with a cavern containing the nine muses in marble and four streams representing the great rivers of England. York House, once the home of the ...”

“... yourself and yet do not sound conceited’. In 1960, after reading some deeply personal poems by Anne Sexton (which were often compared to Lowell’s), she wrote to Lowell: ‘there is all the difference in the world, I’m afraid, between her kind of simplicity and that of Life Studies, her kind of egocentricity that is simply that, and yours that has been ...”

“... rouge, the point of ‘stretching’ a short passage of dialogue, or a scene, was to heighten its power, and slow down time. Melville’s acts of ‘dilation’ sometimes seem superfluous, even perverse, only to acquire meaning later on, like the languorous shot in Le Cercle rouge of a barmaid handing a red rose to Corey, the robber played by Delon, just ...”

“... Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt and an obscure adviser to Oliver Cromwell, Eleanor responded with Anne Hutchinson (the martyred rebel against American Puritanism, accused of believing in free love), Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emily Dickinson and the suffragette leader, Carrie Chapman Catt. Feminist supporter of minority rights, Eleanor Roosevelt is our ...”

“... of referring to ‘Michelangelo Merisi from Caravaggio’ – ‘lived in a time of bureaucratic power, thought police and fearful conformism, in which arselickers and timeservers flourished.’ But his career also coincided with the establishment of the picture collection as a prestigious accessory almost equivalent, for the powerful prelate or banker in ...”

“... a new status in large parts of the world. But the current regimes in the US and Britain gained power by fomenting hatred of experts and expertise. British ministers, chosen for their devotion to Brexit and loyalty to Johnson, have revealed themselves as dangerous blunderers. Trump, still promoting family, flunkeys and conspiracy theories, has obliged his ...”

“... Elif Batuman, Edna Bonhomme, Hazel V. Carby, Linda Colley, Meehan Crist, Anne Enright, Lorna Finlayson, Lisa Hallgarten and Jayne Kavanagh, Sophie Lewis, Maureen N. McLane, Erin Maglaque, Gazelle Mba, Azadeh Moaveni, Toril Moi, Joanne O’Leary, Niela Orr, Lauren Oyler, Susan Pedersen, Jacqueline Rose, Madeleine Schwartz, Arianne Shahvisi, Sophie Smith, Rebecca Solnit, Alice Spawls, Amia Srinivasan, Chaohua Wang, Marina Warner, Bee Wilson, Emily Witt Elif BatumanWhen​ Roe v ...”

“... Singer was learning English. In his own writing, Foer has shown both an unusual faith in the power of written communication and a true believer’s willingness to test its limits. Although most readers became aware of Foer in 2002 with the release of his wildly popular first novel, Everything Is Illuminated (250,000 copies sold in the US), a glance at ...”

“... under the tanks.’ That is too sweeping. What perished was any remaining illusion about Soviet power. The thought of a democratic ‘workers’ control’ socialism survived, although its supporters – like those Poles in the 1970s who prepared the ground for Solidarity in 1980 – no longer imagined that any existing Communist Party could be trusted to ...”

“... can’t be a legend, you have to be older.’ Thomson is not dealing in legend, though, but in the power of desire. Kidman isn’t just a star, or even a legend; she is a hegemon. How did she achieve the status she has now, at the top of the A-list of Hollywood actresses, and how has she kept it for so long? If you think Kidman doesn’t deserve a whole ...”

“... way Karl Liebknecht ended up, ‘murdered in prison alongside Rosa Luxemburg after their bid for power failed in 1919’. But Mark seems so pathetic, his understanding of what he’s doing so slight that the comparison makes him ridiculous. Each time I read the novel, I put it down at this point: I couldn’t stomach any more whiny men, and I couldn’t see ...”

“... and as affecting as anything in The Best Years of Our Lives, a test case for the younger Clift’s power to move us. Responding to an act of arbitrary unfairness, Prewitt has given up a place in a bugle company in order to become a simple infantryman. His best friend, Maggio, played by an impishly wiry Frank Sinatra, has just died as a consequence of the ...”

“... books? What kind of existence do they have? In Imagining Rabelais in Renaissance England (1998), Anne Lake Prescott calls his fictive titles ‘nonbooks’ or ‘promises of books’: ‘oscillating between being and nonbeing’, she writes, they are ‘the librarian’s equivalent of negative wonder’. Imaginary books come close to being real, but then ...”