“... fruits, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, gooseberries, have so deep a resonance and are more closely associated with place, memory and longing.) As he was about to leave, an elderly man came down the large curving staircase. Stern struck up a conversation. His interlocutor turned out to be a former Polish cavalry officer who had survived ...”

“... In the early​ 1860s, Edgar Degas made a copy of Thomas Lawrence’s portrait of Louisa Georgina Augusta Anne Murray. The original, now in Kenwood House, is thought to have been completed between 1824 and 1826 and shows the four-year-old goddaughter of the Duke of Wellington prancing before her audience like a 19th-century Shirley Temple ...”

“... girth – 635 pages, cover to cover – and even vaster ambition, American Visions left me with more questions than answers. Indeed, its stated intention – ‘to look at America through the lens of its art’ – might arouse suspicion from the start. Surely, the idea that art offers an unmediated vision, as though through a transparent lens, of a whole ...”

“... of Henry VIII, on 31 December 1539. This is where Moorhouse starts, in a study of Durham that is more than just a study of Durham, and which is enriched by his usual stylish prose and eye for detail. The book would be a good place to begin if one wanted to understand the life of medieval English Benedictines and the brilliant bureaucratic and political ...”

“... and attorneys – one of whom was, no doubt, elected to public office during the year. What’s more, three will have died of cerebral-vascular or coronary difficulties, two of cancer, one each of vehicular mayhem, diabetes and domestic violence. The spare change will be by act of God or suicide – most likely the faith healer. The figure most often and ...”

“... accusations, Lucia decides to eat in the canteen with the Russians and Poles, to prove she’s ‘more democratic’ than the French and Italian women who’ve been taunting her. She doesn’t realise that the segregation is enforced by the Nazis. ‘Since you love them so much,’ the foreman tells her, ‘go work with them.’ Demoted from the thermometers ...”

“... alternatives produce a good deal of excitement on a world scale, a quieter and intellectually more demanding argument has gone on within the tradition concerning the best way to interpret liberalism, both theoretically and in application to concrete social and political problems. One of the most important issues in this debate is how liberalism justifies ...”

“... daughter. It’s not clear that his artificial photosynthesis project would do that much more to save the world than a trip to the bottle bank. A lot of the effort being expended, with very little success, on trying to prevent climate change might be better spent preparing to deal with its consequences. Except that no one wants to admit that climate ...”

“... the period of enthusiasm for Ossian saw the publication of the important Homeric studies of Thomas Blackwell and Robert Wood. In the late 18th century there was a revival of serious education in the ancient universities, and the institution of the Tripos at Cambridge and the Honour Schools at Oxford had the effect of increasing substantially the numbers ...”

“... copies in Europe. The reception in Anglophone countries but especially in Germany has been much more critical. Yet from the first pages of this gigantic novel, Littell reproduces the Barbie tone: the phoney veneer of learning, the might-is-right fatalism, the assumption that all are equally guilty but only the defeated have to take the blame. Cheap ...”

“... again and again. ‘So go home, sit still and read the works!’ There’s clearly a lot more behind all this than intellectual snobbery and public nuisance. It could be significant that Gastrell was an Anglican clergyman, because sectarian iconoclasm seems to lurk somewhere in the story. It’s all about books and journeys, after all, and the Book ...”

“... other difficulties to contend with. Besides France, with which the Habsburgs were in a state of more or less constant conflict, Christendom itself was under sustained attack, both from without – the formidable Ottoman armies of another young prince, Sultan Suleiman, who styled himself Sahib-kiran or ‘world conqueror’ – and within, in the form of the ...”

“... He only thought about certain details, while he took no account whatsoever of the other more important aspects … And in short, whereas he had thought to surpass in this work all the paintings in this craft, he scarcely reached the level of his own works executed in times past. Binet reproduces this passage, imagining it appearing in a letter ...”

“... pertaining to his subject is being withheld from him during research. When his subject is the more elusive half of a pair of lovers, the question immediately arises as to whether there can be a biography at all. I had to find an alternative method of research. Fortunately for me, from 1931, when Karen Blixen’s (alias Isak Dinesen’s) lover died in a ...”

“... Thanks to Michel Foucault and Discipline and Punish, history students now graduate knowing more about the history of the body than about the English Civil War or the Industrial Revolution. At the same time, everyone has their own idea about what body history should be about. It was Foucault’s view that power always expresses itself by way of the body: his history was (at least in its inception) a corporal politics, intended to reconfigure our understanding of power ...”