“... makes him – so fatigued, thin-skinned and full of teenage chagrin – come alive on the page. Philip Larkin once described Sue in Jude the Obscure as ‘too irritating not to have been a real person’. (You see what he means: ‘I couldn’t bear to let you go – possibly to Arabella again – and so I got to love you, Jude.’) Nikolai’s jibes at his ...”

“... is better, in large part because her mind has continued to change, and so has her life. A short but expansive piece illustrative in miniature of the book’s wide-ranging interests moves from a postcard reproduction of Balthasar Denner’s 1721 painting Alte Frau to a touching remembrance of the late John Berger to a dual meditation on ageing ...”

“... story of six days in the life of a rather self-important, busy young man who has granted himself a short sabbatical. Quite a few years have passed, he says, since he decided to take this meditative mini-break, and now at last he has cleared a whole week to spend in an isolated house with only his thoughts and memories for company. He is planning to retrace the ...”

“... are also taken into account – a supplement to Francis Godwin’s Catalogue of Bishops, the short relation of his time in Ireland (which he wrote as part of an audacious but failed attempt to be made Chancellor of Ireland and Archbishop of Dublin in 1605), his translation of the School of Salerne (a popular medieval versified medical treatise), his ...”

“... proceedings were instituted against him in 1786 (murmurings against him had begun earlier); Philip Francis, the author of the satirical letters of ‘Junius’, was to be his nemesis. Francis had served alongside Hastings in India, and it is clear that he had quickly become jealous of the man and his authority (Bernstein makes no secret of his dislike ...”

“... thinks that the log-normal distribution applies strictly: they are all aware that, at least over short periods of time, the distributions of price changes are fat-tailed, with extreme events happening with relatively high frequency. The canonical model can be elaborated to cope with this, for example by allowing the volatility of prices to change with ...”

“... Novels of B.S. Johnson, a very well-informed book, was published by Paupers’ Press in 2000, and Philip Tew’s B.S. Johnson: A Critical Reading (Manchester), a heavier, more philosophical study, followed in 2001. Tew projects onto Johnson his special interests, which involve many darkly erudite meditations by the philosopher Roy Bhaskar. Johnson is credited ...”

“... Shall I, to please anothers wine-sprung minde Lose all mine own? God hath giv’n me a measure Short of his [i.e. ‘another’s’] canne and body; must I find A pain in that, wherein he findes a pleasure? Misinterpreting ‘canne’ (=‘can’, i.e. measure or capacity) for ‘cane’, i.e. walking-stick, he uses the quotation to illustrate ...”

“... another advantage that might benefit the family. More than a century later, in 1754, 13-year-old Philip Quaque, a Fante of royal birth, was sent to London for the same reasons: he became the first African to be ordained a priest in the Church of England. John Naimbanna, the son of a Temne ruler in what is now Sierra Leone, arrived in Britain in 1791. He ...”

“... class at the New School. The only question was ‘what to write about’. During the 1950s, as Philip Roth would later explain, there was a widespread belief that the ‘devils’ had been defeated ‘once and for all’ and there was nothing more to say about the Holocaust: it was time to ‘start over again, en masse, everyone in it together’. Even The ...”

“... Braudel composing the first draft of The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II in a German prisoner-of-war camp, and a photograph of Vernant, a commander in the French Resistance, in military fatigues at the 1944 liberation of Toulouse.Murray offers up his own biography against the foil of his heroes. He traces the roots of his ...”

“... the agrarian question. He may not have won active peasant support during his leadership of the short-lived Roman Republic, but he was at least successful in neutralising the influence of the reactionary clergy and in avoiding a counter-revolutionary uprising. Republican propaganda had considerable success in the small market towns around Rome; if the ...”

“... that many of the same things are now being said about His Royal Highness Prince Charles Philip Arthur George. For while, in some ways, the British monarchy is constantly developing and evolving, in other respects it is remarkably consistent and unchanging, and one of its most unvarying features during the last three hundred years has been the ...”

“... did affect the way that prominent men and women were described and commemorated. Those who praised Philip Sidney, Arundel and others for their ability to combine courage and sensibility, to pursue arms and letters, had read The Courtier – as had the objects of their praise. Burke follows Castiglione even into the hands of his enemies – the critics of ...”

“... Pei’s 1002-foot-tall Texas Commerce Tower has an observation deck on the 60th floor, a good way short of the summit. From it you look down into the Deco crown of a nearby Twenties block, and across other rooftop areas not quite meant to be seen. The rest of Downtown clusters around, but its glamour is reduced and exposed. What strikes you more is the ...”