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“... If old sea-dog Thomas Coram’s mission had been to found the most English, the most 18th-century of charities, he could not have done better than launch the Foundling Hospital – which he did, its doors receiving its first infant in 1741. Till then, England – unlike other countries – had had no hospice designed for abandoned babies, though such an idea had been floated in a characteristic gesture of lay piety by Addison in the Guardian ...”

“... The novel becomes a farrago of information. In choosing to write about the American Civil War Thomas Keneally ran several additional risks. The potential subject-matter is dauntingly multifarious. How could so vast a tragedy be focused and individualised? It was a war that fairly compels the commentator to take sides. Can the novelist do so without ...”

“... believe existed in all its radiant immaculacy. Hogarth’s London scenes foreshadowed Doré’s, more than a century later, in their depiction of a dark purgatory peopled with prostitutes, pimps, rakes, gin-drinkers, beggars and all the other members of a seamy or downright criminal underclass. The most ample previously known visual accounts of the late ...”

“... heard to blurt out to a woman he had met there: ‘I just want to know what Truth is!’ This was Thomas Kuhn and what he meant was that specific truths such as those of physics mattered less to him than acquiring metaphysical knowledge of the nature of truth. Soon afterwards, he gave up physics, but rather than take up philosophy directly, he approached it ...”

“... of English literary documents have stayed convicted. In two famous cases, those of the 17-year-old Thomas Chatterton, who fabricated poems he attributed to a mythical 15th-century Bristol monk, and the equally immature William Henry Ireland, who forged manuscripts by Shakespeare before which Boswell knelt in adoration, apologists have found a degree of ...”

“... adapted through the centuries when most Tudor music was relegated to the archives.2 Beside him are Thomas Sackville, earl of Dorset, and the earls and cousins Charles and Henry Howard. All three were Byrd’s patrons, and to various degrees shared the shifts and ambiguities of his religious convictions; it was odds-on that all of them would have conformed to a ...”

“... before the Armada, Philip of Spain was king of the country he later attempted to invade. What was more, he had been a new kind of king, the consort of England’s first ruling queen, and one to whom England had violently objected before he had even set foot there. In 1553, Mary Tudor, Henry VIII’s first-born daughter, had acceded to the throne following the ...”

“... him to advertise for leads in a London newspaper. This Elizabeth, it seems, was someone else. More important than the biographical red herrings are the enduring assumptions that flow from Pope’s infamous lines. Haywood’s erotic novels of the 1720s were noisily disparaged by canonical pioneers of the genre such as Samuel Richardson (though Richardson ...”

“... highly regarded, through whose hands they have passed, and so on. In all this I see nothing of more than mediocre intelligence, and I suspect there exists some degree of servility in this enthusiasm. Dare I say what I think of this debauchery and corrupt curiosité? One must somehow enjoy a swindle so to apply one’s mind to studying pictures. It could ...”

“... largest earthquake to strike Japan since 1923. During the twenty seconds of shaking that followed, more than five thousand people died, tens of thousands were injured and three hundred thousand were made homeless. At least £100 billion of damage was caused. Haruki Murakami, Japan’s most popular living novelist, whose parents’ house was destroyed in the ...”

“... around the ironist?’ Braithwaite asks. It’s a rhetorical question, with – ironically – more facets than the man who asks it realises. The novel’s title has many, proliferating referents, but not the least of them is its narrator: Braithwaite himself is Flaubert’s parrot, not only because he’s always quoting him but also because he is living ...”

“... died every day for 1458 days. And like the First World War, the Civil War got bloodier and more destructive as it ground inconclusively on. Five of its six costliest battles, with casualties in the tens of thousands on each side, took place after April 1863, roughly the war’s midpoint. It ended, as the Second World War ended, in an epic struggle for ...”

“... Against the ruins of love and idealism, Alice Thomas Ellis shores up the fragmentary consolations of art. Her books are beautifully fashioned, tailored, cut from superior cloth: you’re aware of the chunks from the fabric of experience that she has rejected, and her characters know just enough of the outside world not to be able to make sense of themselves ...”

“... Some of its contributors are Marxists, feminists and postmodern philosophers. Could anything be more at odds with the no-nonsense common sense of the ordinary man or woman? We have become so accustomed to this usage that it is something of a shock to be reminded by Sophia Rosenfeld that ‘common sense’ once had a very different set of political ...”

“... is closed. The window’s closed and the air-conditioning is on, the dashboard isn’t dusty any more, and the taste of mint gum is in her mouth. In fact the gum is there, she has gum in her mouth right now. She pushes it out with her tongue and it falls into her lap. What’s remarkable is that in the first ten pages of his novel, Lennon has provided such ...”