“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... father that ‘the mistake she probably made was getting married in the first place.’ Dolly sees more of what’s going on than anyone else, though she has learned to keep her own counsel. The Reid family troubles are acted out on a very public stage, with servants and neighbours and colleagues throwing themselves into the fray. The merchant Kuriatin ...”

“... struck by Waterhouse’s concern with the pedigrees of the painters he discussed, men like Thomas Jones, Richard Wilson and Sawrey Gilpin, all of whom are adjudged to be of ‘good family’, and Sir James Thornhill, who came from ‘good Dorset stock’, a phrase more at home in a book on country cooking than in a ...”

“... games, on Facebook, roaming the streets in protest or for kicks, the undead hordes have never been more prevalent. They’re a relatively new phenomenon, as monsters in Western horror go, lacking the canonical pedigree of werewolves or vampires. But the plague spreads quickly. The zombie as it emerged in 20th-century American popular culture, though nominally ...”

“... sense from the point of view of publicity and sales – Eggers’s name sells books, and selling more books raises awareness of and more funds for the causes that matter most to Achak – but it also inspires unease: Achak may benefit from the text, but he doesn’t own it; he has become a character in a fictionalised ...”

“... of 1695 was to prove the decisive engagement in the Nine Years’ War. It was a huge battle, more than 100,000 on each side. William of Orange was in personal command of the allied forces and was making headway against the French, but he had run out of cash to pay the siege workers. A delegation from the fledgling bank zoomed across the Channel to begin ...”

“... showed how a word that originally referred to profitable agrarian innovation took on a more general meaning as a progressive slogan for beneficial change of any kind. ‘Improvement’ was the application of reason and ingenuity to the task of increasing a country’s wealth and the happiness of its inhabitants. It could take many different ...”