“... as a representative extract for much longer and more elaborate babblings, such as the full text of John Berryman’s ‘Step One’, prelude to the general confession he made for Alcoholics Anonymous, wherein the sufferer relates all the harm he has done himself and others. If the day ever comes when I pin that document above my typewriter, it will be because ...”

“... education for all’ was the cry, but the educationalists who raised it were masters of abstract windbaggery – a vague secular religion of moral and spiritual uplift. What it came down to in the end was another year at school, with boys learning to bake a cake and girls to mend a fuse: all very well-meaning, but hardly the stuff of a ...”

“... hens and playing with spinning wheels their husbands are not portrayed as blacksmiths. ‘The old masters’, observed the sculptor John Gibson, ‘represented men thinking, and women tranquil – the Greeks the same.’ Certainly it is true that very few women frown in portraits – frowning being the most obvious way of ...”

“... But he does his best to enliven things with biographical vignettes. The revelation that John Ashbery was a radio Quiz Kid at the age of 14 does nothing to undermine my prejudices against his work, but the ever-catholic Perkins gives a sympathetic introduction. How far, though, is the book a history? By continual cross-cutting, Perkins gives an idea ...”

“... source of woe. In exile from Marian England and toiling reluctantly as a corrector in Basel, John Foxe said he had never read anything ‘less pleasant, more choppy or more rebarbative’ than Stephen Gardiner’s prose (‘he spirals off so wildly that he needs a Sibyl rather than a translator’); Balthasar Moretus of the Plantin company complained ...”

“... in London and Hertfordshire as well as Glamis, the Scottish estate granted to an ancestor, Sir John Lyon, by Robert II in 1372. While not especially wealthy by the standards of the aristocracy of her day, they can have had no anxieties about their place in society, any more than Elizabeth, tucked snugly in towards the bottom of a large and affectionate ...”

“... a tinge of abjection, servants were to be called ‘domestic workers’ and their mistresses and masters would for the first time be ‘employers’. While DWU members wanted ‘a union such as the miners have’, many of their demands reflected the peculiarly intimate nature of living in. Better food, the right to use the same bathrooms as their ...”

“... Pandora’s box: all sorts of new and disruptive things will emerge to which our political masters have so far given only scant attention, in public at least. Consider​ the prospect, much vaunted by some, of a new ‘global Britain’. If this is to be anything more than a slogan, a fig-leaf for a new parochialism, all sorts of changes will be ...”

“... then sow doubt in an effort to depress it’. Chanos told me he was ‘shown the door by my German masters’. ‘Short selling’ is selling shares or other financial instruments that you don’t own, or own only temporarily – shares, for example, that have been borrowed from another investor. Chanos was – and still is – short selling shares that seem ...”

“... confident that it would not, but two of the British Chiefs of Staff, Field Marshal Slim and Sir John Slessor, warned that ‘there was a real likelihood and danger of the Chinese taking this action.’ A million-strong Chinese Army duly flung the US back, Truman began fingering the nuclear trigger and Attlee flew in panic to Washington to stop him. This ...”

“... part because of the insistence on decking out the female form with lashings of drapery. Only a few masters like Braquehais or the painter Degas (if the attribution is correct) are able to breathe life into these conventions derived from the painter’s studio. The turn of the century brings a reversal: the art nude enters its golden age, while the erotic nude ...”

“... colonial conquest that 18th-century pessimists, such as Rousseau or the Russophile English cleric John Brown, believed to be driving the continent towards a future of unrelenting chaos and despotism. In his 1795 essay ‘Towards Perpetual Peace’, Kant wrote that to break this cycle of violence and oppression might require a single ‘powerful and ...”

“... sin beyond belief’, but wants them greened out of existence (almost literally – like John Hersey’s Hiroshima, Cohn’s island’s vegetation has vivid accesses of post-nuclear lushness). The old Thunderer has turned ecologist and technocrat, and his vendetta against man retains some of that insouciance which impels some deities old and new to ...”

“... is part of the authenticating tease (‘real life’ got its own back when later circus-masters developed a habit of giving to ordinary dwarfs the name of Lilliputians). Captain John Biddel, who brought Gulliver back from Lilliput in his ship, was apparently not so scrupulous as Gulliver. According to ...”

“... power relations. Hobbes’s ulterior aim was, of course, to defend a form of absolutism, extending John Selden’s thought that, in a household, only one man’s there to buy the meat. But Hobbes’s views about meaning threaten to prove subversive. Counterfactuals – imagined possibilities – can be used to challenge the status quo. Invert hegemony ...”