“... 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 ...”

“... was never mentioned, except as a sardonic joke.’ He later speaks to the much more hopeful and helpful Judge Butler, of London Crown Court, who directs him to Sherborne House, where persistent offenders are given one last chance before prison. It seems to have slipped Graef’s mind, among all this talk of rehabilitation and last ...”

“... Thomas Carlyle was quite fond of the Chartists – until they opened their mouths. In an essay on Chartism published in 1839, the Sage of Chelsea harangued the political establishment and spoke up for the stoic dignity of the English working man: ‘Chartism with its pikes, Swing with his tinder box,’ he wrote, ‘speak a most loud though inarticulate language ...”

“... means to continue to adhere to principle when fit alone does not determine a clear result – when more than one possible decision could be thought to fit, some perhaps better than others. What kinds of argument can be used to identify the correct one? According to Dworkin, judicial interpretation should aim to discover that reading of the law which makes its ...”

“... Republican positions on taxes and immigration. The Republican implosion is long overdue. For more than forty years, the party fused together two seemingly incompatible political ideologies: Christian moral conservatism and economic libertarianism. The combination was inherently unstable. Business elites, many of whom cared little for the cultural and ...”

“... in their 23 years of marriage, I didn’t even reply.’ But the narrator is replying now, in the more than four hundred pages that follow. The father’s name is Federico, or Federí. The cover of the book shows a detail from an oil painting by Federico Starnone, Operai che pranzano/I bevitori (‘Workmen at Lunch/The Drinkers’), made in 1953. The ...”

“... tradition: no wonder all her serious work steams with the clash of battle between aspects of life more easy for us to feel than to define. It is evident from the complex weave of her novels that it can have been no more easy for her to intuit the central implication of any one of those conflicts – she never trod an ...”

“... and the west, in the old and the new world, are to be found traces of this custom; in some places more, in some places less, but among all and in a certain degree.Others did not share his sense of wonder. In 1835, the American sailor William Torrey was shipwrecked in the Marquesas, where he claimed to have been captured by ‘cannibals’ and forcibly ...”

“... natural disaster of the 20th century, with 17 inches of rainfall in a few hours, gusts of 125 mph, more than 150 deaths and thousands of injuries. It was the only occasion when the orderly room clerks were issued with live ammunition. The wind had blown down the walls of the local prison and seventy inmates, some of them due to be hanged that week, escaped to ...”

“... leave to my son a curse as the almighty dollar.”’ Carnegie might well have wondered whether Thomas Mellon, in passing on his huge fortune to his son Andrew, had not bestowed on him a curse rather than a blessing. The two families made their fortunes in Pittsburgh after emigrating in the first half of the 19th century: the Mellons from County Tyrone in ...”