“... his books, which descend on the study of the decades around 1600 like a great waterfall. There are no signs of fatigue, no inanimate sentences. Behind the loosely conversational manner of his prose lies a precision of thought and structure. How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage, an amiably but inherently contentious ...”

“... Whig historiography stood four-square to its age; there was no suggestion that it was addressed to the happy few, or that it appealed to the justice of posterity against the spirit of the times. Posterity has on the whole avenged itself for this neglect. Macaulay will presumably not lack readers for a good while to come, and Stubbs will enjoy affectionate and respectful remembrance in the small circle of medievalists ...”

“... plotline. But how to screw the girl without ending up in the new semi with the pram in the hall on the council estate at the edge of town? Women in these fictions are enticing but dangerous, knees-together honeypots bartering sex for a ring. To quote Julie Christie, who would know: ‘They exist to be disliked by the heroes.’How, then, to make sense ...”

“... celebrity Axel Munthe. His extraordinary memoir, The Story of San Michele, was published by John Murray in 1929, when Munthe was 72. The first edition rapidly sold out; it went into its 20th impression in January 1931, and has been in print ever since.* The reasons for its wide and enduring appeal have to do partly with its subject-matter – Munthe led ...”

“... IRA was founded. But the joke points to a deeper resistance to sectarianism. ‘There is no our side and their side on our street,’ Pa tells his sons. When a loyalist gunman pressures him to join up or pay protection money, he refuses.Pa isn’t a one-off: this is a film about family values and how they are passed on. His own father is a ‘deep ...”

“... end – five exhalations, bray of expiry,      absolute silence ... Under the Festival Hall is a foetid    tenebrous concert strobed by blue ambulance light.  PVC/newspapers/rags Since Reading on the first and last pages of this book imitates these ‘five exhalations’, it’s curious that there are actually six in Sibelius’s ...”

“... in the Last Supper. If virtually the whole art of painting was perfect representation there was no need to strain for a vocabulary appropriate to anything other than skilled and diligent workmanship. Everything was bound to get harder when painting found other tasks than mimesis. Picasso said that painters no longer live ...”

“... or domicile, and is thus a most slippery concept on which to rear up an edifice of social theory. No one doubts that the Great War wrought changes in attitudes as between ‘Us and Them’, but many of these changes were already on the way. Dr Waites does not shy from the question: if the Archduke’s driver had not made the wrong turning in Sarajevo, would ...”

“... piece on radical pirates after the Restoration; Wilson Hays offers an interesting study of John Everard; and there is some predictably tough and valuable political analysis from David Underdown and Nicholas Rogers. What emerges from most of these essays, however, is not so much the undoubted ideological confluence of English and American radicals, as ...”

“... At some time in the 1730s Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, Midlothian, wrote down advice on the building of what he called ‘a family house’. This should consist of a central main block and two side pavilions, as a precaution against destruction by fire. ‘The main or chief Body of the House ought to be at Least double the Bigness of each pavilion and may serve chiefly for lodging the Master of the family and the better kind of Guests who come to visit him ...”

“... almost without a break, from 1793 to 1815; they end just 12 years before the Great Reform Act. At no other time has Parliament experienced such a concentrated amalgam of trial, triumph and sheer, exhilarating talent. No fewer than 13 prime ministers ...”

“... saw some movies,’ Godard wrote, ‘we were finally delivered from the terror of writing. We were no longer crushed by the spectre of the great writers.’ For Daney the ‘specificity of French cinema can be summed up in a word: it’s an auteur cinema, rich with all the literary connotations of the word.’ Characteristically, he ends his paragraph with a ...”

“... History of China, while still taking Mao’s ideological legacy very seriously. The irony is that no one in China, neither the party leaders nor the masses, would regard the discussion of Mao’s theory as anything other than a waste of time better devoted to making money. An alternative view of Mao, which I expect we shall hear much more about during this ...”

“... Tom’s Cabin in reverse, Tolstoy’s paean for the good old aristocracy and good old serfdom. No Russian writer was so sensitive to current feeling and opinion as Dostoevsky – as his first biographer Strakhov put it, ‘he felt thought with unusual liveliness’ – or more adept at creating works of art out of his response to them, and one of the best ...”

“... and Rouault, three who knocked me flat before I could think, before I knew a thing, leaving me no way back, and took John Keats in a room by the Spanish Steps, stanza della morte, where I caught one glimpse of the flowered beams and fainted fast, and took Pierre Bonnard who delved with me deep in the mysteries of ...”