“... like the landscape it describes, claims a self-sufficiency and recognises no obligation to be more than itself. Now this may seem to be an easy task, to describe a series of landscapes but to withhold any explanation beyond the grasp of a child, and at the simplest level we examine this testimony as we examine that of the children and other naïfs who ...”

“... So much, we may say, is history. But just as the West was indeed California, but also much, much more, so to be a Forty-Niner was also to participate in a certain ‘Forty-Niner’ state of mind (or fever of the imagination) which is crucial to an understanding of the history of America. More than any other ...”

“... When the Scottish radical lawyer, Thomas Muir, was tried before the infamous Lord Braxfield in 1793, he declared that if what he had advocated was treasonable, then Plato, Harrington and David Hume were equally guilty. To the present-day student of Hume, Muir’s inclusion of him in his catalogue of reformers must appear even odder than his appeal to Plato: for Hume is usually and rightly portrayed as a consistent defender of the 18th-century Hanoverian status quo ...”

“... animals and characters with funny names. I’m not wild about whimsy myself, and a first glance at Thomas Pynchon’s new novel had me worried. I could scarcely be surprised by the funny names or the animals, since Pynchon’s early fiction had people called Dennis Flange, Rachel Owlglass and Emory Bortz, and in Mason & Dixon there is a considerable speaking ...”

“... protagonist of his first novel, London and the South-East (2008), ‘he had felt his way towards a more subtle style – offhand, low-intensity.’ Although style, in this instance, relates to Paul Rainey’s telesales manner, the words seem to anticipate the evolution of Szalay’s writing towards the lean and laconic prose of his latest novel, Flesh. It has ...”

“... Thomas Ricks’s Fiasco, published in 2006, was a scathing account of the invasion and occupation of Iraq; The Gamble covers the ‘surge’ that pulled Iraq back from the edge of the abyss. By 2006, with Bush still insisting that the war was going swimmingly and the Pentagon keen to hand the war over to the Iraqis, it seemed that the US was heading for a catastrophic defeat ...”

“... high standards of clarity, rational argument and lucid expression to questions that matter to many more people than the abstract problems of metaphysics, epistemology and logic with which the analytic movement began. He did important work on responsibility, on concepts of causation in law (with A.M. Honoré), and on the theory of criminal punishment, but his ...”

“... Parker liked the small customers best but he had some large ones, too, like Piggly Wiggly, which more or less invented the self-service food store, and the Schwegmann’s chain in and around New Orleans. In 1943, when Edna discovered that she was going to have a baby, Parker’s boss in Kansas City said: ‘Parker, you have to choose a place to live ...”

“... food.No prior record of success burdened the early English colonists. They could not afford the more languid colonialism of the Russian and French empires, whose fur traders established tributaries and commerce over the course of centuries, as well as making occasional attempts at the religious indoctrination of peoples in the tundra and wilderness that no ...”

“... against strong trade winds in an attempt to reach the South American coast, a far tougher, longer, more dangerous voyage. During the gruelling months they spent in the boats, the crew members starved and, inevitably, began to eat each other. The Loss of the Ship ‘Essex’, Sunk by a Whale is a collection of first and second-hand accounts, edited by Nathaniel ...”

“... With the deaths of Thomas Mann in 1955 and of Bertolt Brecht and Gottfried Benn in 1956, a major era in the history of German literature comes to an end. These three are not only the greatest writers of their age, they are also its witnesses. Each of them worked in a different genre: Thomas Mann in the convoluted, partly essayistic prose of his novels, Bert Brecht in the drama and narrative poetry of social dialectics, Benn in the lyrical poetry of radical Modernism ...”

“... in past times belong to what Peter Laslett calls, hauntingly, the world we have lost. The Diary of Thomas Turner claims notice as a sustained insider’s account of how ordinary people lived from day to day in a pre-industrial English village. On Thursday 27 December 1756 two of Turner’s neighbours, Thomas Fuller and ...”

“... With his talent for working on a large scale and with the good will which he enjoyed at court, Thomas Couture could easily have been the Rubens of the Second Empire. What he achieved during the Empire, however, was disappointing and fragmentary. He lived for ten years or so on the credit of his big, frozen orgy, ‘The Romans of the Decadence’, exhibited sensationally at the Salon of 1847, but he never painted another picture that equalled its success ...”

“... The last word of the reissue of Mr Nicholas, Thomas Hinde’s exquisitely glum and fearingly funny novel of 1952, is probably a misprint. At least, it is minutely different from the last word in the Penguin book in 1962, the issue which brought Hinde’s consummate first novel to an even more widely appreciative public ...”

“... In December 1947 the American writer Susan Sontag was invited to have tea with Thomas Mann. She was 14, a high-minded schoolgirl full of literature and the seriousness of life. She had one friend, and this boy, her disciple, had written to Thomas Mann, who was then living in California, telling him that they had been reading his books and admired them above all others ...”