“... and a Parliament no more than a necessary rubber stamp to confirm its conclusions. To a man like John Selden, on the other hand, the notion of a ‘representative kirk’ could do little more than make him cry ‘Praemunire’: to the English, whether Presbyterian or not, the Scottish notion of a General Assembly appeared an entirely unwarrantable ...”

“... as the true source of his ‘hypochondria’. Even the spectacle of resignation frightened him. John Reid, one of his clients condemned to death for sheep-stealing, proved so passive and indifferent when Boswell went to see him in the Tolbooth condemned cell that he tried to hire a ‘resurrection’ gang to take Reid’s body from the gallows and attempt ...”

“... The leading figures in all these books are well-known, and are located in a period of conspicuous intellectual activity in the Scotland of the mid and late 18th century. This was the time when the modern social sciences were created as areas of legitimate study, much of their content for the use of teenage university students. There was also a modest literary revival ...”

“... Fred happens to be married to Zimmern’s daughter Roo; his trip to London to research into John Gay starts badly because he and Roo have quarrelled, and he has had to come to London without her. Arriving in damp mid-winter, he at first has to rely on the company of an American academic couple, the Vogelers, who are dispirited by the climate and by ...”

“... The common reader may feel inclined to lay the same embargo on his writers as the Duke in the Elizabethan tragedy on his courtiers. Great tact, and a sustained intellectual animation to balance the much that is repulsive in the theme, were needed to make a very long book about it as attractive, as well as instructive, as this one is. It is a study of birth as well as death, and among what it shows perishing, besides human victims deserving or undeserving of their fate, are gangrened beliefs and ossified customs, leaving room for a fresher air to blow in ...”

“... feel, imagine or remember which, in their judgment, requires to be curtailed or cancelled.’ John Wing is taken to task for remarking that a young woman’s grief-stricken response to the death of her husband is a ‘typical depressive reaction’: ‘Her grief and mourning are looked upon as a pathological syndrome. The basic decisions are of a ...”

“... a damsel in distress in Wimpole Street. It is odd that Girouard should instead have chosen John Millais’s scarcely romantic and in any case slow-paced deliverance of Effie Ruskin as the great Victorian instance of knighthood in action. Browning, it must be remembered, went on to reflect himself and his heroic intervention in the story of ...”

“... say of his work in relation to that of Matisse that ‘if, on the other hand, you are like me and John and McEvoy and Epstein, then, feeling yourself beyond the reaction and beyond the transition, you have a right to feel superior.’ He was always free of self-doubt. Seeing photographs of him in his smock (he was against trousers but sometimes wore loose ...”

“... of a folk-tale’: immediately speaking, that of another Jean – ‘Jean-de-trop’ (‘John too much’) whose father, seeking a godparent for his latest child, accepts Death in that role; more generally, a masked version of the widely-told tale of Godfather Death, well-known to folkorists the world over. Le Roy Ladurie is well aware that such ...”

“... cared about the play. It was Dead-eye Dick, tormented by guilt in Midland City, who had found old John Fortune’s quite pointless death in Katmandu, as far away from his hometown as possible, somehow magnificent. Would we have a novel, then, if there were no authorial guilt to be discharged? The question is a blunt one, and yet it gains in significance if ...”

“... man’s proven ability to build new homes in outer space’. Thirdly, we have a cod foreword by ‘John B. Wilson BA’ (Burgess’s true name, plus AB spelt backwards?), pretending that the novel consists of papers left by a dead author who derived his title from ‘That is the end of the World News’ (a BBC sonority as awful as the Director of the Spoken ...”

“... their husbands are not portrayed as blacksmiths. ‘The old masters’, observed the sculptor John Gibson, ‘represented men thinking, and women tranquil – the Greeks the same.’ Certainly it is true that very few women frown in portraits – frowning being the most obvious way of representing thought – but then even today young ladies are ...”

“... Mick. Like brothers. Like evil sisters in disguise. A two-headed beast. The opposite of Paul and John. The dark and the light. I’ve always been pulled toward darkness. Toward black. Toward death. Toward the South. Good. Now I’m heading the right direction. Away from the quaint North. Away from lobsters and white churches and Civil War graveyards and ...”

“... included Alan Bullock (recipient of a self-righteous Orwell memo), William Empson and John Morris (both of whom wrote elegant memoirs of Orwell at the BBC); he employed Nye Bevan, Richard Acland, J.B.S. Haldane, T.S. Eliot, Quintin Hogg, Bernard Shaw; he led a BBC party, that included Guy Burgess, to a special de-briefing by Stafford Cripps on his ...”

“... These well-worn lines of Kipling’s encapsulate an enduring feature of the popular English concept of national history – its cosiness. Because of the remarkable quantity and quality of local documentary sources covering more than nine centuries, the historian of England is able to identify with them, and to throw the mantle of Victorian law-abiding domesticity over the past ...”