“... be done could only be done by you. ‘You may be so far ahead with Goldsmith that this book about Swift would not fit well,’ says the typewritten note in the last book he sent me, ‘but it might be mentioned. Goldsmith and Grub Street, then and now, does seem a subject in need of your comments.’ London was always the place for me, and the London Review ...”

“... to spread alarm at what Corbynism beyond Brexit would look like. It’s difficult to see a neat or swift end to this conflict; it’s likely to take more than one election to resolve. If it continues, will Remain – or Rejoin – persist as a potent political identity, or eventually lose traction? Will Labour be able to return politics to ...”

“... Dutch conversations. But in the context of English society in the mid-1720s (the society of Pope, Swift and Gay), van Aken’s classical sculptures would have been read as mock-heroic comments on the scene pictured. A Bacchus standing above a tea service, which Solkin reads as admonitory (‘Better drink tea, not strong spirits’), would more likely ...”

“... he published Austria, Its Literary, Scientific and Medical Institutions, and in 1849 a book on Jonathan Swift, The Closing Years of Dean Swift’s Life. He was also emerging as a famous doctor, specialising in diseases of the eye and ear, founding the first Eye and Ear Hospital in Dublin. In 1841, he was chosen by ...”

“... me of taking a walk with a friend who will spot a ghost orchid, a heath fritillary and an alpine swift while I am just enjoying a companionable stroll.) He notices references to hospitality all over the place: ghosts, for example, the worst kind of uninvited guest, in Joyce’s Ulysses; hauntings that make homes unhomely (unheimlich) in Freud’s ‘The ...”

“... cable across the Channel had been Paul Julius Reuter, who saw that profits could be made from the swift communication of information – particularly stock market prices – between the two capitals.In both countries, scientists and commercial men urged the benefits of standardising other sorts of data, arguing that global trade and communication would be ...”

“... in Hazlitt’s own outlook and essays. ‘The Example of Hazlitt’ occupies the second part of Jonathan Bate’s book, by far its longest section, and the whole literary atmosphere of Regency London, seen through Hazlitt’s eyes and those of his two critics, is alive with Shakespearean character and quotation, with the wiles of Shylock and the arrogance ...”

“... hierarchy of the genres, but it was easier to see what painting should not be than what it should. Jonathan Richardson’s Essay on the Theory of Painting (1715) set off boldly from the notion that the artist must not merely represent nature, only to suggest awkwardly that art should portray what was rarely seen or ‘what never was, or will be in fact, though ...”

“... bandit and identify with it as if it were their own; they admire the ‘strong masculine form, the swift yet penetrating glance, and the passion written on the lines of his face’ and they give utterance to the bandit’s feelings as ‘a shadow whose voice is their own’. It was this incitement to vocal proliferation and promiscuous identification that gave ...”

“... at least the middle of the 20th century. Can there be a proper history of working-class reading? Jonathan Rose believes that there can be, and after five hundred pages, 24 tables and more than 1600 footnotes it’s clear he has a point. His introduction (still more the publisher’s blurb) makes much of the book’s ‘innovative research techniques’, the ...”

“... lid was clamped on nationalist aspirations. In 1848 patriotic rebellions broke out all over Italy. Jonathan Keates’s The Siege of Venice examines the longest-lived of the rebel states that came into being. With its broad view of the 1848 experience across Italy and its detailed account of political developments and divisions in Venice through the city’s 18 ...”

“... of monotony’ – but that hasn’t stopped reviewers of the Tate show serving up stale critique. Jonathan Jones of the Guardian called Burne-Jones ‘stupid’, while to Waldemar Januszczak of the Sunday Times – ‘send all his hopeless droopers to the gym’ – he is merely ‘ridiculous’. Tim Hilton made better reading in 1970, when he observed in his ...”

“... and dissimulate also seems to carry subversive tints of the sort associated with his contemporary Jonathan Swift.The Grumbling Hive provides an allegorical account of a thriving early 18th-century economy, in the form of a colony of heavily anthropomorphised bees. Christian and Stoic moralists recommended virtuous austerity, but Mandeville depicts its ...”

“... defeat of the IRP in 2000, and then the closure of the American border after 9/11, provoked the swift collapse of the agreement. Given that the cartels are better financed, better organised and no doubt better equipped than the state, which is in any case rotten to the core, a return to the way things used to be could seem like the lesser evil, even in the ...”

“... pear and reading a book.’ What interested him about Gide? Barthes’s answer might be taken as a swift epitaph on himself, four brief sentences wonderfully afloat on all they don’t say: ‘He was a Protestant. He played the piano. He talked about desire. He wrote.’ An earlier, more militant remark is worth pondering too: ‘between jargon and ...”