“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Thomas Grant’s​ Court Number One tells the stories of 11 prominent trials heard in Court One of the Old Bailey between 1907, when it opened, and 2003. His aim is to use these stories as illustrations of ‘British sensibilities and preoccupations over the last hundred years … Through the criminal trials … there can be traced at least one version of the history of social and moral change over the last century ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and protected; his greatest ‘labour’ is the burden of carrying his own fool’s bauble. In Thomas Nashe’s comedy Summer’s Last Will and Testament (1592), the fool, Will Summers, trips lightly onstage, half-dressed and unburdened by any of the things regular courtiers have to worry about: ‘without money, without garters, without girdle, without a ...”

“... of birds in Britain in a single calendar year. I never got anywhere close. There were so many more birds that I hadn’t seen than I had. I often tried to turn common birds into uncommon birds. Those house sparrows that haunted the privet hedge by the road: surely one of them was a tree sparrow? In my head there was also a list of ‘magic’ birds, birds ...”

“... at difficult times, enjoin himself in his journal to ‘Be Gray.’ In literary history Gray is more often an object of curiosity than of admiration. He is known for having not just one of his poems but his poetic language held up to the light by Wordsworth, as an example of all that was merely poeticised. In a letter to his friend Richard West, Gray ...”

“... of 1835). The desire for one was certainly there. Beating Grimm very slightly to the punch, Thomas Keightley brought out his Fairy Mythology in 1828; Margaret Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, which appeared nearly a century later, had a similar aim. Since then, books and articles about the ‘fairy faith’ have continued to appear. But ...”

“... Published two hundred years ago this year, An Essay on the Principle of Population made the Rev. Thomas Robert malthus into the man of the moment. Malthus’s principle – that population inevitably outruns food resources – was heralded by some as the decisive scientific refutation of the mad perfectibilist schemes of the French Revolutionaries and their English confrères like William Godwin, and damned by others as hardheartedness incarnate ...”