“... not all forest but is largely made up of human bodies – and not the adumbrations of bodies that may be found in a Forest by Ernst, but palpable flesh and muscle and bone and at the top right an agonised head thrown back. These straining, densely-muscled trunks and limbs locked in a Herculean struggle could well be an allusion, which I cannot yet ...”

“... a challenge shared by both historians and anthropologists. Even if Clendinnen’s interpretation may not command universal assent, it will certainly enjoy a wide readership and elicit vigorous debate. It sent me scurrying back to Sahagun, Bernal Diaz, and other 16th-century chronicles which offer such a profusion of data on so many aspects of Mexica history ...”

“... pathetically out of his depth as minister. Much the same was true of the convertibility crisis. By May 1947, the Treasury knew that import cuts were needed to halt the dollar drain, and warned accordingly. Again and again, ministers dithered, until, in the end, the crisis forced their hands. After 1947, however, there were no more horror stories of this ...”

“... to find examples of such things as female networking. The word ‘gender’ does not appear. This may be no bad thing, but Castor’s readers would have had a better idea of the ‘individual experiences’ of the women she writes about if she had included a fuller discussion of the nature of medieval queenship. Central to that was the queen’s ...”

“... for the lost glories of Fulton, and never even asks whether the civil servants who buried it may have been right. Yet one of the few clear lessons of the last twenty years is that that sort of 1960s scientism is nonsense, that the ‘cult of the generalist’ is much less dangerous than the ‘cult of the specialist’ and that the notion of a ...”

“... standards for judging the noise, the fear, the savagery. ‘Here,’ he wrote from Verdun in May 1916, ‘it is extermination on the ground.’ He told her about the never-ending artillery duel, the comrade who was cut in two by shrapnel, the gas attacks, the dismembered, stinking corpses of horses – everything that newsreels, photographs, newspapers ...”

“... it on are not just topographically open but public, a social as well as a physical expanse, we may begin to think that there is a great deal in them to disable. From the outset, agoraphobia has been regarded by some commentators as an entirely proportionate response to the escalating dangers of modern life. In 1889, in an angry critique of modern urban ...”

“... an older man; André is the older man, an architect living in fear of losing his romantic prize. David is dying of cancer; Sophia is protecting a dead frog that has come back to life. Joanna is a corporate lawyer who has taken on an unscrupulous client to raise money for her ailing sister; Slimboy is a Nigerian YouTube star, fearful of his country’s ...”

“... brings about a substantial (and welcome) reduction by referring only to some two hundred thousand. David Chandler explains that ever since he wrote his excellent book on the campaigns of Napoleon ten years ago, he has been inundated by requests for further information coming from the widest possible variety of people, all of whom are, as he puts it, ‘caught ...”

“... pointy teeth, all at once so English, so ordinary and so glamorous. And it’s four decades since David Bowie – wearing a lot of make-up and very few clothes, grinning through his pointy teeth, all at once so English, so ordinary and so glamorous – released The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. ‘Five years, that’s all we’ve ...”

“... call prominente. Among them were Richard Crossman, A.L. Rowse, Maurice Bowra, Isaiah Berlin, David Astor and the journalist Shiela Grant Duff, who, in 1982, published a book about their relationship, and followed it up with a volume of their correspondence. At opposite ends of the political spectrum he impressed Lord Lothian and won the affection of Sir ...”

“... create a background of deliberate spatial confusion. A partial explanation for this development may be competitive divergence: Donatello was driven to devise original solutions by the success of the older Lorenzo Ghiberti, whose mastery of linear perspective in relief sculpture could never be surpassed. But there can be little doubt that Donatello also came ...”

“... call him an artist. This suggestion, under the rapid wit of the dialogue and the scene shifts, may have done most to compel the admiration of the first grateful viewers of Citizen Kane. Welles’s own ‘presence in the picture’, Otis Ferguson wrote, ‘is always a vital thing, an object of fascination to the beholder. In fact, without him the picture ...”

“... on what he regards as the abuse of old words. Professional linguists take a calmer view, and may even go beyond the limits of mere description and argue that change can tend to renovation rather than decadence. The State of the Language is a large and defeatingly miscellaneous collection which represents these points of view and a great many more ...”

“... David Lockwood is the sociologist’s sociologist in the same way that Ken Rosewall used to be the tennis player’s tennis player: he’s the one the other pros turn out to watch. But you need to know the fixture list. To switch to an older metaphor, he is apt not only to hide his light under a bushel but to hide the bushel as well ...”