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“... of Pat Buchanan, the neolithic challenger to George Bush’s renomination in 1992, and William Buckley, the acidulous Catholic pundit, while making us uncomfortable about longstanding liberal assumptions? This brief volume is not an intellectual ‘life review’, to borrow a gerontological term, but a solemn reflection on the philosophical ...”

“... in a ten-year-old American translation, printed in Great Britain but not otherwise Anglicised. William Hannaher’s translation is particularly effective in its rendering of the author’s virtuoso gifts of metaphor and simile. Kis’s style highlights not only Eduard’s grand visionary projects but the most mundane experiences and objects, from the ...”

“... which, in an earlier period, mingled with paintings to form the Wunderkammer of princes. Leopold William is one of the great collectors Brown discusses, and Tenier’s painting of his collection is historically remarkable because it shows only pictures as displayed objects. The artist’s intention is ‘to show the world that Leopold ...”

“... On the jacket of Playing the Game is a portrait of the man who played it: a portrait by William Strang (1859-1921), a Late Victorian artist now much undervalued. He did what is by far the best portrait of Hardy, and his special ability seems to have lain in pleasing his subjects and their public by making them look suitably grave and important, even a shade portentous, while at the same time revealing hidden traces of weakness, perhaps of meanness ...”

“... clerk or a journalist, jobs he held and discarded, stayed in his thoughts and haunted his novels. William James believed that the careers we might have chosen don’t matter very much: ‘Little by little, the habits, the knowledges, of the other career, which once lay so near, cease to be reckoned even among his possibilities. At first, he may sometimes ...”

“... methods of painting trees, but has surprisingly little to say about Constable. He reveals William Cobbett to be an old curmudgeon who ‘viewed trees much as he did cabbages . . . as utility vegetables’. Mabey misses a trick, being a very southern South Briton, in not giving an account of the rise of the beech as a tree of choice for gentlemen in ...”

“... libertarian paternalism of the Cameron and Obama governments gave us Brexit and Trump instead. As William Davies observes in Nervous States, ‘democracies are being transformed by the power of feeling,’ and ‘nostalgia, resentment, anger and fear’ appear to be taking over the world. There has been endless speculation about the reasons for this, much of ...”

“... envoy of George III. Nobody in Beijing knew why he was there. He assumed that his commission from William Pitt made him an ambassador, and that his mission was to negotiate new trade relations between Britain and the Qing empire. Like many in Britain he believed that the ‘Canton System’ was designed to restrict the scope of British trade at Guangzhou and ...”

“... movements. In the late 1860s, his bank account shows regular payments to someone called ‘Miss Thomas’ – Nelly, it’s assumed. He made arrangements for her to accompany him on his last American trip. They fell through. His will left her £1000. Among the controversial facts is that Dickens and Ellen may have had one or more children, who died soon ...”

“... history of many things, but in most places, at most times, and for most people, it was and is as Thomas Gray described it in 1750: ‘the short and simple annals of the poor’. So far so good. But if poverty is promoted from a platitude to a problem, things become much more difficult. For the problems of poverty are simple yet complex: what is poverty? And ...”

“... victory and fully aware of the potency of the Falklands factor, Tory politicians like Lord Hugh Thomas, the distinguished historian of Spain and Cuba, see the task of historians as the creation of a usable past which will confirm the version of history peddled in the popular press, furnish yet another justification of their claim to authority and boost the ...”

“... literature. The novel has strong connections with the ‘Jacobin’ novels of Charlotte Smith, William Godwin, Amelia Opie and Thomas Holcroft. The use of engagements and marriages as symptoms of the state of society belongs peculiarly to Charlotte Smith as a Revolutionary subject. To Smith, too, must be given the credit ...”

“... she was drawn into the company of the so-called Real Whigs, dissenting intellectuals like Thomas Hollis, Richard Barron, Sylas Neville and Caleb Fleming. She also met and initially admired John Wilkes, whose radicalism took a far more activist form. It was – presumably – in discussions and arguments with men such as these that she hit upon the ...”

“... After working​ on his film adaptation of William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1991), David Cronenberg apotheosised both the writer and himself by claiming his screenwriting and Burroughs’s literary style had synergised. Cronenberg apparently mused that were Burroughs to die he might write his next novel. Burroughs expired in 1997, and although Cronenberg has directed many films since then – operas too – while dabbling in graphic novels and other writings, Consumed is his first full-length work of fiction ...”

“... other remarkable versions of essentially the same tale: Kate Grenville’s The Secret River,2 Thomas Keneally’s The Commonwealth of Thieves3 and Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria.4 The mystery of the stolen continent. Naturally, Australian readers know in advance who did it – and in a sense are still doing it. Newcomers took the country from the previous ...”