“... hope to that saving possibility and not hold out against the occupying forces. His biographer, Peter Dodge, traces all the tortuous visions and revisions that led up to this ultimate misjudgment. He sees Hendrik de Man as a tragic figure, forced into exile (and convicted of treason in his absence), not so much through opportunism, compromise or worse, as ...”

“... anything to shatter my self-confidence or vanity.’ After his death she remembered ‘the joy of reading the letter’ containing what Julian called ‘great news’: he was sleeping with Anthony Blunt – his ‘first love affair’. She realised then that he ‘meant to tell me things. I had never expected it.’ After Blunt Julian’s affairs were ...”

“... mother of God, and the child is therefore her attribute, just as the keys are the attribute of St Peter, and just as the child is also the attribute of St Christopher. This is why we find the child shown twice in paintings which include both the Virgin and Christopher. It also explains why in many polyptychs, especially in North Italy, the Virgin is painted ...”

“... of the Enlightenment dominated historical writing as late as the 1960s, and is best represented by Peter Gay’s two magisterial volumes published in 1966 and 1969. After Gay and Cassirer, two trends dominated Enlightenment history until Israel came on the scene. One situated the Enlightenment in a particular national context, giving little attention to the ...”

“... After reading​ Geoff Browell and Eileen Chanin’s concise history of the Strand, you will never walk down that street again without thinking of the hippopotami that wallowed in a primeval swamp at the Trafalgar Square end. The bones of the hippos, as well as those of ‘herds of straight-tusked elephants and prides of lions’, were unearthed in 1957, when Uganda House was being built ...”

“... of a common Russian sensibility such as Tolstoy had imagined in his dancing scene’. Since Peter the Great, however, this ‘common Russian sensibility’ always contained a European admixture, and Figes criticises those – Rilke, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf – who swallowed whole the myth of a completely indigenous ‘Russian soul’. All the great ...”

“... a ‘shelf or two of BEAUTIES’ and ‘ELEGANT EXTRACTS’ accounted for ‘nine-tenths of the reading of the reading public’. When, in 1928, Laura Riding and Robert Graves’s Pamphlet against Anthologies charged the genre with reducing poetry to a ‘packet-commodity’, the only alternative that they proposed ...”

“... direct ‘sensuous’ enjoyment and the central means to political understanding and intervention. Peter Brook once said he himself had no sense of history as a reality: ‘History to me is a way of looking at things, and-not one that interests me very much’; the artist’s vision is concerned with the present. This view, whatever may be said for it, is very ...”

“... his peculiar talent and acquired his freshness and nimbleness of style. Certainly it was not by reading his favourite writer, Carlyle. His upbringing in Walsall and London was by no means a rollicking one. His father was a preacher turned coal prospector, who sank shafts in the wrong places and then, funds being exhausted, became an ironmonger in the East ...”

“... the rooster crowing, crickets, locusts, and frogs you hear at night down South. I’d practised my reading with him, I recall, back in the first grade reading my primer, Peter Rabbit.Anderson doesn’t pretend to know more than she knows. ‘I didn’t have him in my pocket,’ she ...”

“... myself if I had the flu. I am not a doctor, but there’s the internet and I’m still capable of reading, if not retaining, say, a juicy paper at Academia.edu: ‘Things Fall Apart: Heidegger on the Constancy and Finality of Death’ (by Taylor Carman), so how come I’ve remained so foggy about the details and possible trajectories of my cancer? I tell ...”

“... discourse to enter into the consciousness of Johnson and other characters) is his original reading of Johnson as capable of exploiting the contrast between his ‘appearance – shaking, twitching, pockmarked … and distinctly careless about his dress’ and his ‘remarkable powers of locution’. Nokes focuses throughout on Johnson’s ...”

“... contributions from Jane Ohlmeyer on Ireland and Scotland as ‘laboratories of Empire’, and from Peter Mancall on the troubled relationship between Europeans and Native Americans in the 16th and 17th centuries. The second volume, concerned principally with slavery and the American Revolution, has a sparkling chapter on Native Americans by Daniel Richter, and ...”

“... by association. Both biographies share an aversion to the twice-told tale (by Ernest Jones and Peter Gay) of an Enlightenment Freud dutiful and dauntless in the stables of irrationality. The new biographers have turned away from prelapsarian universals. Rather than insulate his thought from its darker strains, they side emphatically with his fallibilistic ...”

“... system led not only to unnecessary delay but also to unsatisfactory compromises.In Cabinet (1986) Peter Hennessy records that, under Mrs Thatcher, ‘cabinet does meet less frequently, it discusses fewer formal papers, it is presented with more virtual faits accomplis at the last moment, and she does prefer to work in ad hoc groups – many of the most ...”