“... it was the right choice for the novel: separating Jim from his parents is a neat way to convey to more cosseted readers the strange combination of deprivations and freedoms that life in the camp consisted of. There were many children who were interned in Lunghua without their parents. Ballard describes one of them, Bobby Henderson, in Miracles of Life: Bobby ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... especially blood. If, as Orwell says, Billy Bunter is a first-class comic character, then how much more so is William. His creator, a clergyman’s daughter and one-time Classics mistress, polio-stricken, never grew to despise him, though she may have had dying regrets that none of her 39 adult novels achieved anything like the fame of her 38 William ...”

“... But observers (and perhaps other chimps) could be forgiven for thinking it was a reference to Thomas Henry Huxley, the best-known ‘man of science’ in Victorian England, a comparative anatomist who also became the leading, and most aggressive, public spokesman for evolutionary ideas, to the point where he was known as ‘Darwin’s bulldog’. After ...”

“... Sand Water muscling to shore at twilight, Muscling over her ribs, the water so warm For September. Thomas Paine said, We just couldn’t stay boys (regarding the colonists) Or something to that effect. Ladybugs gather, covering a pear, Gulls screech about the deserted lighthouse. How agreeable to discover Someone loves you, or even later, That you’ve become a fixture In someone’s stable of influences ...”

“... while another Hals painting, The Singing Boys (c.1623-27), adorns the companion volume, Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture. The Singing Boys is no doubt meant to recall Middleton’s early work for the Children of Paul’s, one of those boy companies whose performances were punctuated by songs and entr’acte music; but the fleshly ...”

“... 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, ...”

“... the sermon itself are, however, only mentioned in chronicle accounts, albeit contemporary ones. A more reliable source records a rebel being indicted for freeing Balle not from the archbishop’s prison at Maidstone but from the bishop of London’s prison at Bishop’s Stortford. Since this was on 11 June, and the rebels were on Blackheath on the afternoon ...”

“... a three-volume anthology, Women Writing Latin: From Roman Antiquity to Early Modern Europe. Two more women, an American medievalist, Rita Copeland, and a Dutch classicist, Ineke Sluiter, have now edited the monumental Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric: Language Arts and Literary Theory, AD 300-1475, but it is populated exclusively by men even if two women write ...”

“... poorest he that is in England has a life to live as the greatest he.’ This assertion by Colonel Thomas Rainborowe in November 1647 seems almost a cliché, as much part of the democratic history of England as the Magna Carta or the Tolpuddle Martyrs or Paine’s Rights of Man. Yet for two and a half centuries after Rainborowe said his piece, no one knew ...”

“... 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 ...”