“... order. And if the role of the new Kyoto Center is to facilitate such a process, then a bit of salt may be in order. If one reacts too strongly, there is a danger of increasing the self-importance of these individuals and giving them extra exposure as guardians of cultural kudos. So how do we help both the Japanese and ourselves? The first essential is to make ...”

“... has embarked on a prolonged quest in search of a vanishing princess, a dancing point of light who may or may not exist outside the bounds of his own desire. Seeking her, Jordan allies himself with John Tradescant, the botanist and traveller who was also bent on the pursuit of an exotic ideal. Fiction and history merge in ...”

“... phrase, is said to be delineated more clearly here than in earlier accounts. The claim may be conceded: but not all veils are drawn aside. In 1896 Churchill was ‘an intolerable nuisance’, according to Birkenhead, in his fruitless efforts to avoid the ‘tedious land of India’ and to scramble into a scene of military action and glory. We are ...”

“... manager breathing down their necks, and the surviving independents with modest annual turnovers, may well discover new talent as they always have in the past. But they will have great difficulty in holding on to that talent. Author loyalty can be strong, but is rarely strong enough to withstand six-figure inducements. Small independent publishers will become ...”

“... they point out how, before coming to Rome, she was more thoroughly of her time than she and others may have realised. Likewise, her affirmation, in Rome, of a radical democratic view of America was streaked with irony and poignancy, for, as she told her friends, she could only find her radical America in Rome. Vance is just as alert to nuance when he treats ...”

“... coincided with the last great age of letter-writing. Moreover his friends were people who had what may now seem an unusually pressing need to keep in touch with one another, even when not very far apart, and this need was well served by the Post Office, which, before 1914, gave London eight deliveries of mail each day. Woolf himself had a long spell as a ...”

“... are always more or less absurd. Hopkins said, ‘Christ is your only literary critic,’ and it may be added that He does not run a book club. But Lewis certainly achieved the distinction of being represented, on an upper floor of Wheaton College, Illinois – Billy Graham’s old college – in the collection of memorabilia of such Christian writers as ...”

“... of generations, the Civil War will lose its chronological centrality in American history, and may well come to be regarded, not so much as the great crisis of the very principle and possibility of the Union, but rather as an early difficulty that had to be overcome – one of the Union’s teething troubles. James McPherson, who has spent most of his ...”

“... issues such as the nature of explanation, the sense in which an explanation or theory may be said to be ‘final’, and whether the end-product of science is a nice-sounding, though possibly false, story about nature, or on the contrary a true and valid account of the way things are. Whenever such matters are dealt with in science books, the ...”

“... that ‘even among families known for their support of puritanism,’ attachment to predestination may not have been as strong as it seemed. The point is worth arguing, and Dr Sharpe gives us three examples. The first is the Earl of Huntingdon, though he does not tell us which Earl. Since, as he has stressed elsewhere, successive Earls held very different ...”

“... the Falklands War, and indeed long before that. There are many questions which a fighting man may reasonably be asked, but ‘Are you scared?’ is not one of them. Fifty years on, we have a public which, as Fraser says, is all too ready to shape its behaviour to the media’s demands. The ‘Are you scared?’ brigade does not hesitate to needle the high ...”

“... a satire on affluent America. Suddenly it comes to me that this is one gap in literature that I may be uniquely placed to plug. Consulting a map of London, I see how I might be able to skate across the city from park to park, from Regent’s Park to Vauxhall Gardens via Hyde Park, Green Park and St James’s Park. Such an epic skate would be more than just ...”

“... of painting never assert their individuality in this way. The life of a piece of sculpture may of course be endangered by the material it is made of: bronzes were melted down to make canons; Inca gold sculpture was pretty often turned into ingots. The process of making can sometimes be understood by just looking at a surface. Penny shows a detail from ...”

“... really fail quite as badly as this book implies? Should not future editions include entries on May McKisack (an expert Medievalist), on Dorothy George (who pioneered the scholarly study of cartoons), on Phyllis Deane, the economic historian, and indeed on Natalie Zemon Davis? And, while I am labouring this particular point, should women’s history really ...”

“... Gary Bennett were not strangers or even remote acquaintances but friends and that whatever else may be said in its favour the Preface was a sharp personal attack, bred out of disappointment.’ Maybe there are moments when humanists can see things rather more clearly than theologians. Certainly, that passage contrives to put Bennett’s conduct in the ...”