“... that Chaucer mentions (‘His barge ycleped was the “Maudelayne”’). That ship’s master, Peter Risshenden, together with the famous pirate John Hawley, captured three ships loaded with wine. Such activity is behind these lines: Ful many a draughte of wyn had he ydrawe Fro Burdeux-ward, whil that the chapman sleep. Of nyce conscience took he no ...”

“... the extraordinary band of young artists, architects and critics (including Richard Hamilton, Peter and Alison Smithson, and Lawrence Alloway, among others) who developed, from within the Modernist Institute of Contemporary Art, a Pop sensibility of their own. His revised dissertation, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, made his scholarly ...”

“... with unconcern. Byatt comments: ‘He looked up and had the disconcerting sense that Dorothy was reading his mind.’ There is a section break, and Byatt continues: ‘Dorothy had indeed, more or less accurately, followed Philip’s thoughts. She did not know how she had done that. She was a clever, careful child, who liked to think of herself as ...”

“... fingers.’ She is, of course, fondling the details, as it she were a student of Nabokov: ‘in reading one should notice and fondle the details,’ he adjured his class at Cornell. As a writer, Nabokov is a fanatic for detail, his mimesis rivalling that of nature itself: ‘when a butterfly had to look like a leaf, not only were all the details of the leaf ...”

“... to be entitled to a powerful sexual overtone, even if not the customary one. The reviewers of Peter Gay’s book have been very receptive to the thought that we have got Victorian sexuality wrong: for it is a leading part of the author’s argument that the Victorians were not prevailingly ignorant, inhibited, prudish and hypocritical about sex. But the ...”

“... of Lit-Lite. The fawn jackets. The suit-bags. The shaved sentences. English fiction (the creative reading list), as he satirises it in King of the City, acquires an energy that it would not otherwise espouse. Here is the unreconstructed ‘engine of comedy’, Rex Martin (‘the famous farting novelist’) and his diminutive son, Felix. Here is ‘Jillian ...”

“... lives, talk and attitudes of the vast majority of the population in past times belong to what Peter Laslett calls, hauntingly, the world we have lost. The Diary of Thomas Turner claims notice as a sustained insider’s account of how ordinary people lived from day to day in a pre-industrial English village. On Thursday 27 December 1756 two of Turner’s ...”

“... tall writing-desk, pacing round his furnished rooms, and checking the rhythm of his sentences by reading them out loud to imaginary audiences. But from time to time he would venture outside for a ‘people bath’, and his small, alert and slightly crooked figure was well known in the streets and theatres of Copenhagen. The philosopher of solitude and ...”

“... theories in Patriarcha, seemed intent on making himself almost literally the father of the nation? Reading this essay I was reminded of Joe Orton’s comments when the Lord Chamberlain blue-pencilled the use of Sir Winston Churchill’s penis in What the Butler Saw, substituting a metonymous cigar. ‘What am I saying?’ Orton protested. ‘That he had a big ...”

“... the Church locked up in original Scripture, in the Veritas Hebraica and the Veritas Graeca. Nobody reading this excellent book needs to go on thinking that Rabelais was a Humanist, not because of his study of the litterae humaniores (the Humanities and the thought which they conveyed in philosophy, law, morals and medicine), but because he liked human ...”

“... by two years.) In places he unnecessarily diminishes his own subject, reflecting in the manner of Peter Laslett that every society contains a degree of conflict, and that occasional expressions of it are a matter of routine. Well, of course, it all depends on what we mean by politics. If, like Hobsbawm, we regard as political only actions which are directed ...”

“... correct. Professor Maynard Smith recounts how when he was a boy, he was introduced to science by reading books written for the lay person by the best practising scientists of the day; and in an essay entitled ‘Understanding science’ he posits two imaginary readers: ‘One is an intelligent but ignorant 16-year-old: myself when young. The other is an ...”

“... the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries – the Europe of Anselm, Adelard of Bath, Bernard of Clairvaux, Peter Abelard, Hugh of St Victor, Suger, Otto of Freising, John of Salisbury, Chrétien de Troyes, Marie de France, Hildegard of Bingen, Gottfried von Strassburg, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Roger Bacon, Snorri Sturluson, Leonardo Fibonacci, Aquinas and many others ...”

“... over by it. By the century’s end it had already gone through hundreds of editions. In his ABC of Reading Ezra Pound proposed the critical exercise: try to find out why the Rubaiyat has been so successful. Not so difficult, perhaps, for the poet who would be inventing ‘Cathay’. Orientalism was also a Late Victorian vogue, and as Martin points out, the ...”

“... government refused to deal, Herr Scheel accused them of ‘abetting murder’. In 1975, when Peter Lorenz was taken by the Baader Meinhof, Schmidt agreed to every demand. But in that same year, when the Baader gang took the German Ambassador in Stockholm, Schmidt would not deal. He called it the ‘ad hoc’ line. Ms Moorehead has done a highly efficient ...”