“... au Surréalisme. It became immediately a precious book for me, both as an evidence of the power of poetry and as evidence of a power in criticism I had not before encountered. The reading of this book and then of Georges Poulet’s first volume of the Etudes sur le Temps Humain as much marked an epoch in my life as ...”

“... wonders what he would have made of Stone’s lectures, in which we were taken back to the reign of Henry VIII, and learned as much about population movements and the educational system as about religion and politics. It was the total history of the English old regime which was the true subject of these spell-binding lectures, delivered in the hall of Wadham ...”

“... as set out in a series of addresses by the SPR’s president, the Cambridge philosophy professor Henry Sidgwick, are extracted in the first volume of Shane McCorristine’s expansive recovery of 19th-century studies in ‘the night side of nature’. The selection opens with vivid early-century reports of ‘apparitions’ and ‘spectral illusions’; in ...”

“... size and shape have generally been at some remove from the norm. One self-enforcing advantage of power and status has always been the ability to command a flattering reflection. If anyone thought that at 54 inches around the waist, Henry VIII was fat, they thought twice about saying so and in Holbein’s portraits of the ...”

“... surely, is what it wasn’t – other-indulgent, rather. My models were the styles of Proust and Henry Green as I read them (one in translation): styles of tender exploration that tried to wrap themselves around the things, the tints and voices and perfumes, of the apprehended real.’ The words that stand out in Updike’s description of what he is up to ...”

“... writers of the 18th century, Ignatius Sancho and Olaudah Equiano. In the Seventies, the Black Power movement’s insistence on the need for black people to be aware of their own heritage, and the huge international success of Alex Haley’s Roots, intensified interest in the subject. Then came the Brixton Riots of 1981. The first International Conference ...”

“... population live in rural areas, it also gave him political clout. The election that brought him to power was a protracted mess. Scheduled for 2015, it was repeatedly put off and finally scrapped after widespread fraud allegations and massive protests. A new ballot was postponed after Hurricane Matthew. By the time Moïse was inaugurated in 2017, the imbroglio ...”

“... Agreement and the resulting UN peacekeeping mission were successful because they ended the Great Power manipulation of Cambodia. To Martin, this is wrong: the peace accords merely cleared the decks for local powers to interfere. In his previous books on Cambodia, Shawcross concentrated on international intervention, from the American bombing ordered by ...”

“... is, that we can satisfactorily explain the unceasing innovations of language, and the astonishing power of individuals to produce utterances they can never have heard before, only by imputing to the human brain an innate competence to deduce the processes, or ‘rules’, which produce, or ‘generate’, recognised patterns of verbal activity, a ...”

“... in good company: Francis I, king of France since 1515, had been born in the same year as him, and Henry VIII (crowned in 1509) was three years older. Charles V was installed as Holy Roman Emperor in 1519 at the age of nineteen. Still, Suleyman had large shoes to fill. His father, Selim, had doubled the size of the empire during his eight years in ...”

“... published, so that the world should know, not only that England was golden with the accession of Henry VIII, but also that Erasmus had been summoned. His lofty earlier debates on the Agony in the Garden and Cain and Abel with his friend John Colet would have remained unknown – Colet was not one to rush into print – if Erasmus had not written them up and ...”

“... point Hamilton was already feeling his Pop enthusiasms fade; by the time Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979 they seemed frivolous. Treatment Room (1983-84) is an installation that evokes a bare clinic: a partition with a window, a white trolley partially covered by a standard blanket, and an intrusive monitor showing a looped video of Thatcher delivering ...”

“... him as ‘the Hotel Florida Stalinist’ – but it also reconciled him to a few anti-fascist power brokers at home, such as the treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr, for whom Hemingway agreed to ‘look into’ the Chinese during a trip to China with Gellhorn, who was writing a piece for Collier’s in ...”

“... met Warner she had had more female than male lovers. One of the most recent was Dorothy Warren, Henry James’s goddaughter and Ottoline Morrell’s niece, who on one occasion gave Ackland laudanum before beating her till she bled, and on another tried to strangle her with a tie. Ackland’s memoir, For Sylvia, which tells some of this past, is ...”

“... atrocity was thrilling enough to become a regular offering from commercial studios. The Imperial power seems to have felt that documentation was a duty. Professionals found a market for records of landscape, architecture, native types and portraits which extended the coverage. There are pictures in this exhibition which record official life: the ...”