“... in his disenchantment with this freedom. Little wonder, since his life, pleasingly chronicled by Richard Vanderbeets, began in St Petersburg amid aristocratic Anglo-Russian relatives whose licensed eccentricities would have spoiled anyone for Hollywood. ‘From his great carved bed’ – this was a favourite uncle at play – ‘a .22 calibre pistol in his ...”

“... leader. The connection is clearest in his prison letters, now published in their entirety in English for the first time. Arrested after anti-Fascist action was declared illegal in November 1926, Gramsci wasn’t actually tried until June 1928, when he was found guilty of ‘conspiratorial activity, instigation of civil war, justification of crime and ...”

“... spend in opposition. Roy Jenkins’s Asquith, Anthony Crosland’s reflections on socialism, Richard Crossman’s Bagehot, would hardly have come out of Whitehall, and Michael Manley would not have found time to write a history of West Indian cricket which encompasses the social, economic and regional problems of the Caribbean if he had been engaged in ...”

“... Richard Rorty has made us familiar with the distinction between two sorts of philosophy, which he calls ‘systematic’ and (I think infelicitously) ‘edifying’. The first sticks to the central epistemological tradition, which assumes that it can deal systematically and progressively with reality; the second is essentially of the periphery, and its exponents are pragmatical opponents of the institutional tradition ...”

“... degree, are now the ‘Huns’. They commit atrocities, murdering babies and kicking captured English officers and gentlemen in the behind. So let pictures of such actions be prepared by artists and hung up in every munitions factory. ‘When Miss Cavell was shot we should at once have shot our three leading prisoners. When Captain Fryatt was murdered we ...”

“... at a once familiar corner. Part of it was gone. The Walgreen’s drug store where, as teenagers, Richard and I had tormented Louie, was gone, replaced by a huge, white, faceless department store, as was the jewellers where I had stood for hours desperately wanting those hideous rings with heavy red and purple stones in them. In almost every other way ...”

“... at the end of his Wars of the Roses tetralogy: while Henry VII may have been as murderous as Richard III, he was nothing like as charming. Francis Bacon was ready to praise Henry’s politic wisdom in the 1622 biography that was to frame perceptions of the king until late in the 20th century, but he could not disguise the price of Henry’s determination ...”

“... Of the thousands​ of people who visited the Buckinghamshire astrologer-physician and clergyman Richard Napier around the beginning of the 17th century, many were troubled by questions of sleep. The mother of 11-year-old Susan Blundell told Napier that her daughter was ‘now given mutch to sleeping’, and that two days before, she had slept ‘the space of 24 houres but that her sleepe was interrupted with her usuall fites & that very often ...”

“... is simple and touching, the Quatre chansons françaises as fecund as anything written by the young Richard Strauss. Perhaps inside every 14-year-old boy there is a mature mezzo soprano struggling to get out. Certainly there was in the young Benjamin Britten, and he knew how to give expression to her. Where did this exuberantly released energy go to? It can be ...”

“... which rings through the book like the 13th chime of the clock – that where the old form of English trial was a truth-seeking process, albeit an inefficient one, the modern Anglo-American adversarial trial is dedicated to the suppression or evasion of the truth. ‘Adversary procedure,’ he says, ‘represented a material worsening of the truth ...”

“... claim even the strongest poet can make than the one Keats made: that he ‘would be among the English poets’, construing ‘among them’ in a Bloomian way as ‘in the midst of them’, future poets living out of Keats’s pocket as he lived out of those of his precursors. Analogously, there is no stronger claim which even the superman can make than ...”

“... and developed by the Cadburys in the 1890s, the estate is explicitly modelled on an ideal of the English village, with the mostly semi-detached houses playing a set of variations on the theme of the cottage. Consulting Pevsner as I walked around, I was surprised to find that, normally rather sniffy about the various forms of imitation and revival that make ...”

“... by incontinent artillerists. Dr Phyllis Hembry re-creates in meticulous depth the heyday of the English spa, ending in the early 19th century when the fashion of sea-bathing was challenging the supremacy of the inland waters. Let us not forget the splendours of that heyday, in Bath: ‘The most fashionable library before 1800 was James Marshall’s in ...”

“... How many people in fact found Britain’s mainland colonies a land of opportunity? The late Richard Hofstadter suggested that the answer would almost certainly not sustain the success myth. In America at 1750: A Social Portrait, a wonderfully sensitive piece of writing, he observed that the servants as well as the slaves had been commodities, goods sold ...”

“... and Metamorphosis – Charles Martindale, who protested at Tom Paulin’s review in the LRB, and Richard Swigg who many months ago answered Alistair Elliott’s more brutal review in the TLS – have every reason to wonder that Tomlinson should still solicit the suffrages of a public that shows him such ill-will. He must be, so it must seem, either ...”