“... considered a shame that she hadn’t tried writing something less rebarbative. Her younger brother Arthur ‘often lamented’, the 1804 editor of the Essay recalled, ‘that a sister possessing such amiable manners, and such abilities, should only be known to the literary world by a satirical work’. It would take another hundred years at least for it to ...”

“... or that English version captures or even surpasses the original, one might suppose that there is little point in reading a foreign novel in the original language. Yet some literary styles remain elusive in translation. The characters in Elsa Morante’s masterpiece, Arturo’s Island, are bewitched and bewitching, in thrall to someone, or to some ...”

“... a great part of the population of Normandy marks itself off from the Parisian riff-raff by putting little longship stickers on their cars. The longships are called drakkars – for reasons no one seems to know, any more than they know where the wildly impractical horned helmet idea comes from – a word which has only some resemblance to genuine Old Norse ...”

“... that many of the same things are now being said about His Royal Highness Prince Charles Philip Arthur George. For while, in some ways, the British monarchy is constantly developing and evolving, in other respects it is remarkably consistent and unchanging, and one of its most unvarying features during the last three hundred years has been the miserable lot ...”

“... photographs show is a dark, strikingly semitic girl holding the palest, blondest, most angelic of little boys. Erikson has been blamed for ignoring his Jewish background, but for him to assume that he had one gentile parent was not unreasonable. If Karla Abrahamsen had been, as Erik’s half-sisters later suspected, virtually raped by an unknown, it would ...”

“... As for mistakes, it is surprising that the King James apparently has so few. Alter corrects very little, sometimes unconvincingly, though he is more specific on flora and fauna. His de-Christianisation is largely in the avoidance of frequent King James terms such as ‘salvation’, ‘soul’, ‘mercy’, ‘sin’ and its sister, ‘iniquity’. He ...”

“... early on. He’s a lover traduced, but is he right that Britain has become a self-harming, venal little nation since it spurned his affections? That’s how it looks, to be sure, and his evidence is depressingly thorough, yet he’s confident we brought this on ourselves and hopeful, for that reason, that we can come to our senses and reinvent the ...”

“... worst off, those in cramped tenements or industrial back-to-backs built in the 19th century, had little if any space, while the rural poor, who were unlikely to own what land they had, worked it primarily for food. Willes’s title seems counterintuitive but she makes short shrift of the distinction between a garden for leisure and an allotment for work. In ...”

“... Stein speaks to the butlers and the chauffeurs, the studio wives, the bit-part players, to the Arthur Miller, Dennis Hopper and Gore Vidal part of the universe, and none of them lets her down, or lets her off. It is a wild compendium of stories about what it is to be a child in a world of childish adults, and her book feels political, a meditation on the ...”

“... writes, to the ‘myths and fabrications which have been popularised by courtiers and toadies like Arthur Schlesinger’, whom he refers to as ‘a sycophant’. He is similarly tough with Stanley Hoffman for being too respectful of Henry Kissinger. Hitchens is at his best when on the attack. He can’t stand Cyril Connolly, whom he sees as a precious old ...”

“... extend and perhaps challenge the work of a Winckelmann, a Darwin or a Burckhardt. There would be little point in defending them as places where the rare or obscure can be rediscovered in private and where anyone, however poor, can speculate and meditate in peace. They have to present themselves as exciting places to shop, with didactic but fun videos, and ...”

“... to the more deft and ‘flexible’ Harold Wilson, who, it seems, had tired of being ‘Nye’s little dog’. (Bevan had left the Shadow Cabinet on principle over British support for the growing war in Indo-China. Is there a premonition, here, of Wilson’s later attack on backbench rebels against his own pro-LBJ regime, warning them that every dog was ...”

“... This is the familiar gobbledygook by which bureaucrats through the ages have puffed up their little initiatives (what does Paragraph 59 mean, other than ‘we may be a bit more flexible about who we take, but don’t bet on it’?). Elsewhere, the language has a more sinister tinge. In the ‘Statement of Purpose’ it is declared that ‘our function is ...”

“... his interpreter, the expedition succeeds in its aim without alienating the Chinese populace. A little too emblematic, perhaps; especially the name of the steamer. But an appendix to An Insular Possession directs one to Hall and Bernard’s Narrative of the Voyages and Services of ‘The Nemesis’ (1844), where one will find that Mo’s account is accurate ...”

“... been soft on the subject of death: ‘one would need a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell’ is the best-known of literary criticisms. In fact, succeeding generations, while following Wilde’s sneering direction, have generally misread or skipped the protracted death-scenes that multiply in Victorian fiction. If they do not amuse or ...”