“... to change a plug or drive a car.His school-leaving prize, which he chose for himself, was G.M. Young’s Victorian England: Portrait of an Age. His turn towards history, and towards its Victorian legacy, was beginning. No other book made such an impact on him. ‘It was an inspired choice,’ Sisman writes, ‘for it was a work that Asa would refer to ...”

“... proved an unignorable source for current work, in the way that Heidegger and Wittgenstein have. Edward Skidelsky sees a recent positive shift in the winds of his reputation, but he is suspicious of the reasons for it. The very idealism and liberalism that make Cassirer seem to so many such an anachronism also render him newly appealing as the apostle of a ...”

“... had already proved impossible: in 1553, the last year of the reign of Elizabeth’s brother, Edward VI, an English expedition had tried to sail to China round the north of Russia. Most of the sailors froze to death near present-day Murmansk, but some of them made it to Moscow, where they struck a trade deal with Ivan the Terrible – nearly as good as a ...”

“... and ignorant, patriotic, white-feather-giving women, and the ‘Old Men who sacrificed the young with such complacency’. The story has become even oppressively familiar: so much so that one begins to wonder if it is not false, and actually in some minor ways I think that it is false, at least in implication. The chief trouble, though, lies elsewhere ...”

“... has the younger generation of royals exactly endeared itself to the national headmistress. Prince Edward has never recovered from the fiasco of It’s a Knockout, Fergie’s foray into fiction was equally ill-advised, and if Marina Ogilvy had not existed, the tabloids would probably have invented her (which to some extent they undoubtedly did). Even the ...”

“... art, hybrid, impure, heterogeneous, visionary, obscene, dangerous, self-contradictory, chaotic? Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism cites Blake’s remark in its early pages in order to mediate an assertion and a denial. The assertion is that culture is a crucial factor in the desire to found and maintain imperial regimes; the denial is that this fact ...”

“... is explicit sympathy for the old dying alone, for exploited husbands and overworked wives, for the young with their fragile illusions: but it is all cold comfort. ‘They’ are marched up and down their streets without much sensitivity, either imaginative or metrical; the flat caps are matched by a flat-footed rhymeless pentameter. Dunn reproaches himself in ...”

“... New Poems (1908); Duino Elegies (1923), Sonnets to Orpheus (1923). His Letters to a Young Poet (1903) have also been treasured by several generations of readers, often readers who are not otherwise much interested in modern poets. This scheme and these dates suggest a perfectionist writer, writing only sparely, much at the mercy of his ...”

“... central argument is simple enough. Long before the acknowledged masterpieces of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, long before the English reached their nonsensical apogee in the reign of Victoria, a few privileged Elizabethans were already developing a surreal and proto-Carrollean sense of humour, cultivated most often in the elaborately flippant literary games ...”

“... by W.T. Stead, in a compartment by itself. It exemplified the New Journalism which, according to Edward Dicey, then editor of the Observer, catered to consumers who ‘liked to have their mental food given them in minces and snippets, not in chops and joints’. As Curtis demonstrates, Law and Order reports increased newspaper sales. After the Chapman ...”

“... of Stratford-upon-Avon is the author of the works published in his name: not Sir Francis Bacon, or Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, or Christopher Marlowe, living on in secret after his apparent death in a brawl in 1593 (before most of Shakespeare’s works were written), or one of the more than 50 alternative candidates who have been proposed since the ...”

“... examined the child, claimed to have detected promise of mathematical genius. Moving on to King Edward VI Grammar School in Aston, Reed specialised in Classics. Since Greek was not taught, he taught himself, and went on to win the Temperley Latin prize and a scholarship to Birmingham University. There he was taught and befriended – as were his Birmingham ...”

“... a budget of £106 million in 2019; its car was the slowest on the grid by far. Most drivers start young, racing in go-karts from the age of five or six and moving up through Formulas 4, 3 and 2 before, if they’re lucky, getting a seat in an F1 car. It can cost £50,000 a year to compete on the karting circuit and £500,000 to race a season in Formula ...”

“... he made are also extremely pretty. Sunlight casts shadows of delicate wooden screens on walls, young women in elaborate clothes lead idle lives. There are bright flowers and pet animals. Surely this delectable environment, with its convincing sense of ease, is a true reflection of the timeless Orient – of a real alternative world? But Yeazell points out ...”

“... had to be careful and was likely to be subject to gossip and censure whatever she did. As a young woman Kauffman was often described as a ‘coquette’: there was much speculation about her relationship with Joshua Reynolds, and Marat later claimed to have seduced her in London. There was no substance to most of it, but Kauffman knew the risks she ...”