“... chiefly to a mass public of what he would certainly have regarded as the lower orders by means of television serials about early Roman emperors. As the great Fernand Braudel observes, ‘the obscure history of everyman’ (l’histoire obscure de tout le monde) is ‘the history toward which, in different ways, all historiography tends at ...”

“... others with respect doesn’t just happen, even with the best will in the world; to convey respect means finding the words and gestures which make it felt and convincing.’ But if that is the case, then not only will ‘sheer goodwill’ fail to provide the answer to the scarcity of respect, so will ‘institutional levelling’ of the inequalities woven into ...”

“... one that it had too little Shakespeare and no short poems at all (in such contexts, ‘great’ means ‘long’). But though there were omissions, there were no silly inclusions; Homer and Virgil and Chaucer accompanied Stendhal and Jane Austen, Dickens and Tolstoy and Henry James; and near the end was one poem that certainly might, in its intensity, be ...”

“... Some years ago, the novelist David Foster Wallace submitted himself to a long television interview with Charlie Rose, the PBS chat-show host. It was a terrific performance, and in it Wallace talked about why, in much of his work, narrative is split into body-text and footnotes: There’s a way, it seems to me, that reality’s fractured right now, at least the reality that I live in ...”

“... She exploited Austin’s role as the treasurer of Amherst College to wangle her own husband, David, into powerful university positions and forced him to build her a Queen Anne-style house just across from his family home. After his death she conned his surviving sister, Lavinia, into deeding her some land. But, perhaps most damning of all, Emily ...”

“... he chose to disparage, not least the work of former friends and rival contemporaries. When David Sylvester once asked what precisely was so deplorable about it (a ‘kind of caution’ perhaps?), Bacon’s response was studiedly offhand. ‘Well,’ he drawled, clearing his throat. ‘Well . . . Illustration surely ...”

“... Invisibility: Mastering the Art of Vanishing (Steve Richards, 1982, a peerless guide to the many means of making oneself disappear), and Time Is an Illusion (Chris Griscom, 1986, a seminal lesson in past-life therapy and the unreality of time). Steve Richards – a pseudonym, no relation to the biographer of Gordon Brown – may or may not still be in hiding ...”

“... Kardashian (you knew it was only a matter of time before the Kardashians came into it), played by David Schwimmer in the TV series, was perfectly certain in life of his friend’s innocence, yet, in TV-land, certainty is just a crease to be ironed out by the ‘journey’. In the first episode, we see Kardashian talking to his shy young children at the ...”

“... publicity material. Sheng shi hua zhang is a sonorous and vaguely archaic-sounding phrase which means something like ‘Splendours of an Age of Prosperity’, apt for the Qing era when the Chinese emperors ruled the largest and most populous empire on the globe. It is also a term with contemporary resonances, widely used to describe such phenomena as a new ...”

“... East Coast, where euphemisms are easily understood, and a phrase like ‘painting houses’ means contract killing, as it does in Scorsese’s The Irishman (2019). Though the obvious does occasionally have to be explained. As Michael Corleone says in The Godfather Part II, ‘if history has taught us anything, it is that you can kill anyone.’ It’s ...”

“... and family life, on which the settlement’s ‘blueprint for growth’ was premised. By contrast, David Neal’s monograph opens with a successful legal action brought by a convict couple against one of the First Fleet captains. Neal is concerned to show how the establishment of the rule of law in a penal colony, at once a tautology and an oxymoron, created ...”

“... calls ‘the British landed establishment’, or, more vaguely still, ‘patricians’. By this he means three groups: the titular aristocracy (and their children) from the three countries of England, Scotland and Ireland; those members of the titular baronetage who held land (and their children); and those squires whose landed property amounted to well over a ...”

“... court of Lorraine, at Lunéville. She was fat, looking in her portrait by Tocqué a little like David Hume (her friends called her ‘La Grosse’); also hopelessly disorganised, full of neurasthenic aches and pains, and a great groaner and complainer – but this last somehow in a companionable fashion, showing she was as interested in ...”

“... a highly readable and scrupulously accurate account of Marlowe’s life in its historical context, David Riggs’s The World of Christopher Marlowe (2004), which no new archival discoveries have rendered obsolete.* It is an even bigger difficulty that there is a similarly unsuperseded historically contextualised introduction to Marlowe’s literary ...”

“... altered and three were quashed. It’s easy to see why so many of these cases go to appeal. But as David Ormerod, the law commissioner, said to the Justice Select Committee, the outcome of these appeals – like those of the original trials – ‘are often perceived as illogical or unfair’. In May 2010 two South London gangs, Shanks and Guns and the ...”