“... until 1603, when James VI succeeded to the English throne, would talk of union become orthodox. More than an accident of naming links the scholastic philosopher John Major with John Major of Brixton: they stand at either end of a long phase of political development. The Early Modern period saw the emergence of ideas of nationhood in England, Scotland, Wales ...”

“... the first decades of its existence the Museum was dominated by the Library, which took up far more space than the collections, and the books stayed when natural science found specialised accommodation in South Kensington and oil paintings in Trafalgar Square.The themes of ‘Enlightenment’ (‘Classifying the World’, ‘Art and Civilisation’, ‘The ...”

“... she could not guess and would never know, for at that moment the wave fell upon her and she saw no more. The first section of the novel is an astonishingly sustained piece of hallucinatory writing, and the distance between the reader and the world of myth is not unlike what it would be were the action taking place underwater, in slow motion, silent – the ...”

“... revolution, Che Guevara, the central banker of the new government, had been inspired by the much more extensive land reforms Washington had imposed on postwar Japan, which limited land to one hectare per person.For Eisenhower, the conqueror of Europe, upstart radicals in Central America and the Caribbean were flies to be swatted. Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala ...”

“... for this lack of beauties by an insensitivity and a certain Northern severity that might be more of a blessing than a curse.’ The Germans, Herder said, should content themselves with having at least noticed their lack of beauty. Out of this realisation, he believed, there might one day spring a new, ...”

“... part of it. Richard Parkes Bonington’s ‘La Ferté’ (c.1825) When, as painting drew more on other paintings than on memory, imagined landscapes in this tradition began to lose their connection with real sunsets and seasons, painters who preferred looking to imagining had a chance to move to the front of the pack. The sources were to ...”

“... Equally awkward has been the relation between the nation in question, ruled from London, and the more symbolically potent local allegiances that divide the island geographically. Now, however, Curtis sees a need to multiply the conundrums of Tate Britishness. She is looking at the same tangle of questions explored by Jeremy Harding in his essay ‘Europe at ...”

“... Bradford Booth. Indeed before his death in 1968 Booth had, with some assistance from Ernest Mehew, more or less completed it, but on what appeared to Mehew as faulty principles. Thus the present elaborate and magnificent edition, which is to run to eight volumes, is largely Mehew’s own work. One gets the impression that it could hardly have been better ...”

“... dainty, ladylike endeavours involving pills and gas stoves and other hushed methods, became more assertive and noisome – pistols first, then shotguns. The silence was broken. In some odd quarters, this was counted as progress. A traditionalist in most matters of life, my mother was, nonetheless, ahead of her time when it came to death, dying three ...”

“... System, was developed by the American military. The US Department of Defence currently spends more than a billion dollars a year maintaining it. There are 31 GPS satellites orbiting the earth, all monitored, along with hundreds of other military satellites, from Schriever Air Force Base in Colorado. For the system to work, a receiver on the ground ...”

“... In 1827, Thomas Carlyle, already the translator of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, was invited by Jeffrey, editor of the Edinburgh Review, to ‘Germanise the public’. Jeffrey issued the invitation cautiously, even negatively, asking Carlyle to temper his enthusiasm for ‘your German divinities’ – an enthusiasm he could scarcely understand, let alone share ...”

“... Edward Thomas​ called the approach to Oxford by train ‘the most contemptible in Europe’. There’s no view to speak of, and the station is a big shed with lots of glass and cheap detailing: blue pillars and PVC fascias. The city’s relationship to the railway, like its relationship to the world, is arrogant but insecure, high-minded but petty ...”

“... From one point of view, Thomas Crow’s remarkable pair of books, Painters and Public Life in 18th-Century Paris (1985) and Emulation: Making Artists for Revolutionary France (1995), can be described as a history of the decline and fall, and amazing final reprieve, of history-painting in France. Long cherished by the Academy of Painting and Sculpture as the highest and ‘noblest’ genre and the summit of a painter’s ambition, by the middle of the 18th century the theme of critics and philosophers was that, in the France of Louis XV, history-painting was simply impossible ...”

“... Well: the poems were lying about, & I did not quite know what to do with them,’ Thomas Hardy wrote to Edmund Gosse shortly after the publication of his first collection, Wessex Poems (1898). ‘It is difficult,’ he went on, ‘to let people who think I have made a fresh start know that to indulge in rhymes was my original weakness, & the prose only an afterthought ...”

“... seemed no less remote to us than the ghastly, overdressed 1950s family who lived in our rather more ancient French textbook, dining on chocolate ‘tartines’ served by a maid in a silly hat. Marcus always seemed a little forlorn, but I put that down to the stiffness of his tunic, his authentic but uncool haircut (hovering between the Beatles and pudding ...”