“... fact. He has a sharp nose for the chicanery inherent in Athens’ hard-scrabble politics; he has read, and profited by, a remarkable amount of modern scholarship, by no means all of it in English. Best of all, he never lets us forget those complex and class-ridden family relationships that were, paradoxically, the main driving force behind ...”

“... by the man who will be our next prime minister.’ Matthew Goodwin, a presenter on GB News, read off a litany of violent crimes committed by asylum seekers and implored the audience to ‘take back your country’, promising to ‘weaponise these issues all day long’. It was time to ‘start putting the security of the British people and our children ...”

“... information, then – as Gramsci said of Machiavelli – it is mainly the outsiders who need to read about it in books. This sort of cynical wisdom contrived to make doctrinaire Utilitarianism look gauche, just as the appeal to history was intended to make it sound glib. The historians were certainly serving their own purposes when they claimed to have an ...”

“... the opposite danger is lack of perspective, since, whenever it was written, the text is here to be read in hindsight and judged accordingly. It should be said at once that this is more than an ephemeral feat of instant publishing. Seldon has written the indispensable historical guide to the Major Government: its triumphs and its failures, its achievements and ...”

“... and obsessions turned out to be so strangely decisive, the most illuminating book I have read is Gerald Newman’s The Rise of English Nationalism. As many others have done, Newman describes how English patriotism arose from below during the 18th century and was directed specifically against France and Frenchness, but he lays particular stress on ...”

“... the work as he made it. This distancing is symbolic of his social situation, for his life can be read as an attempt to reduce the distance separating an artisan such as himself and an aristocrat. Jonathan Brown begins his biographical essay with the assertion that ‘The life and career of Diego Velázquez revolved around a weighty dilemma – how could he ...”

“... so I looked eagerly to see how it was translated here. ‘An itinerant existence,’ we read, ‘was often the lot of the mad,’ which is certainly an improvement, even if a residual tension has now been glossed over. For, as Foucault remarks some pages on, the mad were wandering ‘on the road of a strange pilgrimage’, and there was indeed ...”

“... The dead writers,’ Eliot said, ‘are that which we know.’ They are also, Peter Ackroyd might want to add, that which we don’t know we know or wish we knew better, agents of prodigious but incomplete hauntings. From The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde to Chatterton, Ackroyd has shown himself an adept in the speech of such ghosts ...”

“... seemingly indifferent to the internal regulation of its direction. It is this focus which informs Peter Goodrich’s Languages of Law. The book appears to be a collection of disparate essays, oddly connected and repetitive, but which nevertheless circle back obsessively to the question of how the law sustains its own authority. Goodrich continually queries ...”

“... install itself in every part of the Labour machine’. The authors ‘expose the machinations of Peter Mandelson ... whose regime and methods can be rivalled only by that of Bernard Ingham’ etc. In fact, although Heffernan and Marqusee have written the book in an ‘openly partisan spirit’ (we ‘have an indictment to make and we make no apologies for ...”

“... vaguely coloured with nostalgia. They don’t engage my imagination. Even as a child, though I read about polar explorers and enjoyed the mise-en-scène of polar bears, white-outs, ice floes and the rest, the word ‘north’ exercised over me little of the magic it has for so many others, including Kavenna and ...”

“... I have been persuaded of the rightness of the moral position advocated in Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation for the past twenty years. There is, in my view, no moral justification whatever for the human exploitation of animals. I was convinced of this principally by reading the path-breaking book, Animals Men and Morals (1971), edited by Stanley and Roslind Godlovitch and John Harris ...”

“... of the belief that Hitler has a specific history in German Romanticism. It is a delusion which Peter Paret and especially William Vaughan are quite ready to take for reality, while Norman Stone’s own dreams about ‘the positive qualities of Hitler, his real achievements’ (thus Professor J.H. Plumb’s Introduction) aid and abet it: if Hitler was some ...”

“... evidence, and that misinterpreted. It is certainly difficult to see how anyone who has actually read Buchan, Sapper and Yates can yoke the first with the other two. For the difference in flavour – between decency and indecency – compare these three bouts between hero and foreigner. Hannay v. Colonel von Stumm in Greenmantle: He half tripped over a ...”

“... a folder with these words on the cover: NOT TO BE HANDLED BY PATIENT. I open up the folder and read as much as possible without Bertha noticing: ‘In situ carcinoma. Some spread to the lymphatic area.’ I thought they didn’t know yet if cancer had spread to the lymph glands. I assumed they’d taken the lymph glands out to see if it had spread. I’m ...”