“... hucksterism and fewer footnotes. You can take the temperature of the writing from the very opening passage, where it is stated that ‘We have placed men on the moon, yet ... ’ In my experience, this is the unvarying prelude to a mass of dissociated generalisations and complaints, of the country-dogsward variety. Gingrich affects to believe that the country ...”

“... is extremely tactile, its touchingness embodied in touch, its feelings felt in the fingers. The passage work in the recapitulation of the first movement of the A minor Piano Sonata (K.410), for example, describes an expressive contour which the hand that plays it brings into being, as though the hand were singing, as though the exquisite dissolutions of the ...”

“... demand nothing further of the artist than a smile or a tear.’ According to Jane Mayo Roos, this passage shows ‘the degree to which the public came to the Salon to be amused, titillated, horrified and thrilled, much as they would seek some of the same pleasures at the café-concert.’ And why not? Why shouldn’t they expect successors to great early ...”

“... it was: not only solitary reproduction but self-regeneration. Among the highest forms of life – Charles I, say, or Louis XVI – to cut in two is to kill; but to divide the LCS in two is to stimulate a process of infinite growth, ‘unbounded extension’, apparent immortality. Alongside this representation of the Society as unbounded, however, there is ...”

“... OED gives ‘incision, cut, score or gash’ as the first meaning for ‘scotch’, and cites this passage. Powell also notes that Sonnets 74, 77 and 82 indicate that ‘the Young Man was a reviewer.’ The indicative phases are: ‘When thou reviewest this, thou dost review/The very part was consecrate to thee’; ‘The vacant leaves thy mind’s imprint ...”

“... was another of the things affirmed, as Perry Anderson suggests when summarising an argument by Charles Jencks: In a society where information now mattered more than production, ‘there is no longer an artistic avant-garde’ since ‘there is no enemy to conquer’ in the global electronic network. In the emancipated conditions of today’s ...”

“... being in the mouths of so many: the Earl of Bothwell abused her body at his pleasure, having passage in at the back door.’ Mary’s enemies, the Confederate Lords, also issued a ballad, accusing Mary and Bothwell of the ‘beastly buggery Sodom has not seen’.Mary was not a fanatic; unlike her uncles or her namesake in the South, she had no interest ...”

“... in Byron’s letters to his undoubtedly homosexual (code word ‘methodiste’) Cambridge friend Charles Skinner Matthews. When, writing from Falmouth before setting out on his Mediterranean tour of 1809-10, Byron talks of being ‘surrounded by Hyacinths’, Marchand duly explains that Hyacinth was a youth beloved by Apollo and that, as used by Byron, it ...”

“... homosexuality was, if not quite in the open, certainly accepted. Hambleton’s regulars included Charles Scott Moncrieff, who introduced Coward to Oscar Wilde’s lover Robbie Ross, through whom he met Siegfried Sassoon. But Coward wasn’t a bohemian or part of any set that could even retrospectively be seen as countercultural. He absorbed many of the ...”

“... affection’ for the Bourbon monarchy: he later confessed to weeping at the sight of Charles X being forced out of Versailles. But professional ambition led him to swear an oath of allegiance to the new constitutional monarchy of Louis Philippe d’Orléans. When asked to choose a side, Tocqueville, not for the last time, preferred to maintain an ...”

“... Attendance rose. The Empire, on Leicester Square’s north side, was reopened in 1989 by Prince Charles, while the cinema named after him, on Leicester Place, opened in its current incarnation in 1991, offering tickets for £1. Cinemas were built at Staples Corner, the junction where Edgware Road meets the North Circular and the M1 (six screens, 1991); in ...”

“... work in European literature, both parts written in the shadow of the Inquisition. In another passage, Cervantes gives Sancho some lines whose reference to the expulsion of the Muslims and Jews is unmistakeable: ‘I’d like your grace to tell me why is it that Spaniards, when they’re about to go into battle, invoke St James the Moor-Slayer and ...”

“... ends, it suits them. The new Higher Education Act was given royal assent just nine days after the passage of the Public Order Act, which eviscerates the right to peaceful protest in the UK – just in time to empower the Metropolitan Police to arrest six members of the anti-monarchy group Republic on the morning of the coronation, with little outcry from the ...”

“... a rather disappointing sight, even when viewed through a telescope. The great Parisian astronomer Charles Messier described it as ‘a very feeble light, evenly spread out around the … nucleus’. Sometimes its tail was visible, sometimes not. Often it seems to have looked like a very small luminous cloud, or just a blurry shape in the sky. But we don’t ...”

“... of the group. In August 1876, when he was 21, he wrote to William Ward about their contemporary Charles Todd, later chaplain to the Royal Navy: ‘In our friend Todd’s ethical barometer, at what height is his moral quicksilver? Last night I strolled into the theatre about ten o’clock and to my surprise saw Todd and young Ward the quire boy in a private ...”