“... modern England. This will be such a monumental exercise that the very bloody-mindedness of it all may undermine the complacency of one or two of you. Obtuse as you are about Christianity, and liable as you may be to confuse it with the Bishop of Durham, I am going to shock you into a consciousness of its ...”

“... concerned. All the same, the magnitude of Elliott’s achievement is not in doubt, whatever one may think of Olivares. The first thing he has done is to bring Don Gaspar back to life. ‘Heavy and squat, with a bulbous nose, black moustachios and a splayed black beard’ – the Count-Duke can thank Velazquez for impressing posterity with his physical ...”

“... lives in those years, and to show how an understanding of the Seventies in this historical context may help us to see where we are going next.’ The decade was, he tells us, ‘in fact the most important decade of the 20th century’. Later he qualifies this and calls the Seventies ‘arguably the most important decade of the 20th century’. He uses the ...”

“... admirable edition of The Winnington Letters, that in his missives to those schoolgirls one may hear the voice of Ruskin addressing the girl he loved. Of course, the fact that such letters were addressed to tender minds made all the more delicate the expression of Ruskin’s religious sense; and there is a beauty in what Ruskin says to the girls that ...”

“... the curtest and most essential boiling-down of the bardic imprecation, is an idiom which we may or may not owe to the playing fields of wherever, but the Opies have collected many an example of the death-dealing taunt. Their enabling factor is that they aren’t normally for real, however near the bone. In most cases ...”

“... expired, he applied for the chair in physics at McGill University in Montreal, hoping ‘that this may make J.J. act in respect of getting me something to do in Cambridge. I will probably go in for a fellowship this year ...’ In fact nothing materialised, and most of Rutherford’s great discoveries were made at Montreal and later Manchester. He returned to ...”

“... this article is intended to provide instead of opinions. My ensuing truths, my later rightnesses, may not be such obviosities, but unless they live up to this one’s objectivity, I shall accept that I have failed. Now, what gives me the right to imply that I speak with such authority on the rights and wrongs, the truths and delusions of broadcasting? There ...”

“... nowadays are concerned with the trivia of the past, and believe that it is through them that they may find deeper understanding, they ought to be interested in Napoleon, because we must know more details about his daily life than about anyone’s. We know what he liked to eat and when and how he ate; we know about his dreams and superstitions, how he behaved ...”

“... translate into English). It is a book which, thanks to its careful preparation and construction, may be enjoyed at many levels and many times over. And yet the consequences of the prolonged period of composition have not all been wholly beneficial. In the first place, over the 27 years of parturition, Braudel has lost some of his notes and ...”

“... phrase ‘among his host of ghosts’ for dans la troupe de ses fantômes is the one thing that may cause a raised eyebrow or two, but even this presumably bears the stamp of Yourcenar’s authority. Marguerite Yourcenar is that rarity, a Stoic among novelists, but fiction is much more commonly a form for Epicureans. Outside the realist and naturalist ...”

“... friends too often replace intimacy with elaborate, punning jocularity. His famous secretiveness may have been a natural desire to protect the bolt hole Turner the famous painter had in the character of Turner, common-law husband of Sarah Danby and father of two daughters by her, or, later, Turner, alias Booth (sometimes Admiral Booth), common-law husband of ...”

“... A novel may have a coherent plot, passably differentiated characters, fluent dialogue, passages of well-turned prose, and still be worthless if it isn’t also about something that matters. In this respect, the contemporary British novelist has a hard time of it, coming to the form when so much has already been said, when the necessary subjects have already been turned into novels many times over ...”

“... jets – and partly to try and build a financial and commercial empire. The turning-point was May 1982, when he was invited onto Radio Four’s Money Box to explain his so-called new wheeze, bond-washing. (Buy a gilt just after it has paid a dividend, when the price is lower, hold it until just before the next dividend is due, when the price is ...”

“... Latinist. It is possible I suppose to see this not as a problem but as the whole point, and this may be how Byatt thinks of it. The point would be, I take it, to labour in vain in order to establish that the labour is vain – that the attempt to invent Victorian fictions will invite and enable us to reflect on the impossibility of doing so; to realise that ...”

“... in so many ways, footling, offensive, a bad, interminable joke; and sympathetic commentators may be reminded of those who dutifully spoke for the defence at the Lady Chatterley trial while feeling that it was a bad book. Frank Kermode, writing of what he approvingly termed ‘decreative’ Modernist poets in a 1966 essay on T.S. Eliot, suggested that one ...”