“... The Excellency of a Free State of 1656 sums up both Machiavelli’s notoriety and his place in the short-lived English republic: ‘It was a noble saying, (though Machiavel’s), “Not he that placeth a virtuous government in his own hands, or family; but he that establisheth a free and lasting form, for the people’s constant security, is most to be ...”

“... and his assistants have embarked. The two most uneventful years in what remained of King’s short life begin in the wake of victory, with the bombing of four black churches and two ministers’ homes (this time, unlike a year earlier, the dynamite on King’s front porch failed to explode); they continue through the formation of the Southern Christian ...”

“... among university lecturers; some of them, like his colleague in the University of Wittenberg Philip Melanchthon (‘Black-Earth’, from his original surname, Schwarzerdt), kept this name for the rest of their lives. In Dr Luther’s case, though, the new surname was also a devout play on words, reflecting a sense of the liberation which came from his ...”

“... to Petrarchan scholars, and Christopher Celenza tucks into them with quiet determination in his short life-and-works overview, Petrarch: Everywhere a Wanderer. The subtitle is taken from one of Petrarch’s verse letters, where he describes himself as ‘peregrinus ubique’ (more precisely translated as ‘everywhere a pilgrim’). He was indeed a restless ...”

“... for which Watt’s very title, with or without sceptical quotation marks, remains the usual short-hand designation.’ From the 1980s onwards, attack was the dominant mode of engagement. Parodying the accumulating barrage, Lennard J. Davis wrote that Watt ‘made some really big mistakes’: He thought there was ‘a’ novel; he thought it had a ...”

“... the interplay between a bourgeois hanging on to an ageing modernity and the counter-culture,’ Philip Mann writes in The Dandy At Dusk: Taste and Melancholy in the 20th Century (2017), ‘that makes the 1970s.’As Kraftwerk developed their new, distinctive sound, they also evinced a talent for supplying quotes of the sort that on-the-make young music ...”

“... do so. For much of the 18th century, these were limited in number, comprising a handful of small, short-lived institutions. London’s first commercial showcase of contemporary art, organised in 1760 by a group calling itself the Present Artists, included work by Katharine Read and the future Academician Mary Moser; exhibitions held subsequently by two rival ...”

“... and unconvinced, marred in their judgments by a ‘fatal distaste for self-criticism’, as Philip Martin puts it. In J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, the dodgy English professor David Lurie’s seduction of his student is bound up with his admiration for Byron’s poetry, Lara in particular.It’s easy to forget, in this context, that Byron was the same poet ...”

“... dealers, calls Thomas at home to tell him which books she’s found, and visits a friend called Philip Maurel in his shop, where he sells ancient coins. The reader might notice a ripple of trouble in what Tara tells us about her marriage: they used to travel together but have stopped; their phone conversation ‘lapses imperceptibly into a kind of audio ...”

“... which are often drowned out or made unintelligible by the sounds of the road or the subway.In the short film Lettre de cinéaste (1984), commissioned for television by the Institut national de l’audiovisuel, Akerman, lying in bed, speaks directly to the camera: ‘If I make films, it’s because I didn’t dare take up the challenge of writing.’ Was this ...”

“... to the drug companies made its way back into the pockets of haemophilia clinic doctors. Blood, in short, became part of an elaborate, global biofiscal infrastructure with a life – many lives – of its own. Part 3, ‘Blood Money’, charts the history of this economy. There were of course national variations within the global market. In Japan, collections ...”

“... an examination of ideas and their influence might be Felix Holt, the Radical. On the surface, this short novel has quite a lot in common with the novels I have been discussing in these lectures, especially Crime and Punishment and The Red and the Black. The hero is a Radical of independent mind. He comes from the lower middle class, is poor, indifferent to his ...”

“... revolutionary and poetic’. He said he devoted thousands of hours to astrology. He once cast Philip Larkin’s horoscope, probably an underappreciated service. All of which implies cultural history painted with the broadest of brushes: the villain of the piece is the Renaissance, that catastrophe of individualism, which gave birth at once to the hubris ...”

“... to a farming apprenticeship in Uganda. The First World War took him to the Western Front. In his short, unpublished memoir, ‘Scenes from My Life’, he describes how, ‘thoroughly fed up with the mud of France’, he took advantage of some leave in London to visit the War Office and request any posting which would take him out of the trenches. For the ...”

“... they seem faintly to shadow, but more private intensities of self-contemplation: they work, in short, as ritual games and puzzles, effective by their exclusions – their interesting mix of violence and nullity the opium, perhaps, of the English rectory and manor-house during the troubled inter-war period. With an extraordinary unanimity, good ...”