“... whiff of the fervent. The initiation is, after all, a formidable one. There is a huge programme of reading to do before you will be taken seriously by the cognoscente, and you will not find any short cuts through the thickets of the Library Edition (39 volumes, all magnificently edited, none slender). Add to that all the secondary ...”

“... a Tory MP, and died a hero on the battlefield in May 1917. Val had two sons, the elder of whom, Peter, b. 1907, inherited the tendency to be a paragon, and the younger of whom, Ian, b. 1908, inevitably became the family handful. Things were not helped by the wills of Val and Robert, which absent-mindedly or maliciously left the boys’ mother, Eve, with not ...”

“... effect of blurring at least one critical dimension of the dynamics of resistance and transference. Reading the Wolf-Man’s version, one recognises the comic possibility that while Freud was busy pursuing his own agenda, mining the precious ore of infantile eroticism, the Wolf-Man was imperviously following his own, delivering up the ore in patient hope of ...”

“... supplemented by material from his extensive personal archive, by much oral evidence and by wide reading in newspapers and secondary literature. Since Kinnock was never in government the evidential basis of Westlake’s biography is not diminished by the Thirty-Year Rule. The European Commission’s archives and a reworking of Kinnock’s papers aside, what ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... from his Utopia. Even so, it had been Erasmus who had given him letters to friends such as Peter Giles, dedicatee of Utopia, in Antwerp and it was Erasmus who saw to the publication of Lucian, the epigrams and Utopia, bustling about to secure commendatory letters and so enhance them. Erasmus also coined and disseminated the description ‘a man for all ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”