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“... But what difference does it really make how far Bosch understood the dialectics of heresy? What he drew on most deeply was his own chaotic subjectivity, and there he found images of the conflict that goes on making and unmaking our very sense of the human, pushing ‘humanity’ back to its wild beginnings. Isn’t Bosch’s ‘man’ the locus of a cosmic and ...”

“... design: to stop Stalker. On the basis of his interim report Stalker has been appointed by Sir Philip Myers, Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Police, to conduct a full inquiry into the part played by the RUC in the 1982 killings. Impatient to resume his task, he is frustrated by administrative obstacles which are put in his way: but finally decides to ...”

“... His correspondent, John Hohnsbeen, an art-dealer friend, was having an affair with the architect Philip Johnson, and the ‘unprivate walls’ are those of Johnson’s famous Glass House. Schuyler was 28 and this was his first serious mental breakdown. He had only recently arrived in New York after an extended stay in Italy, where he worked for a time as ...”

“... experience. Such endeavours include Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia (1728), a work which Johnson drew on for the Dictionary, the French Encyclopédie, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall (1776), and the more specialised works studied by Lawrence Lipking in his important book, The Ordering of the Arts in 18th-Century England – Charles Burney’s History of ...”

“... in the LRB on 13 April 2000, the economists Fischer Black, Myron Scholes and Robert Merton drew on the log-normal distribution (and on a number of other assumptions about market conditions) to reduce the complicated problem of understanding the prices of options to a relatively simple differential equation. The work, published in 1973, won Scholes and ...”

“... from London was then particularly distorting. On the issue of votes for women, the two countries drew together, but there were still differences. The power of the Church was much greater in Scotland, and at various levels the Scottish Church gave support to the movement. The most unexpected feature of the Scottish story was the organisation of male ...”

“... Philip Larkin once wondered what it would be like for a lover to step inside his skull. ‘She’d be stopping her ears,’ he decided, ‘against the incessant recital/Intoned by reality, larded with technical terms.’ Stepping inside the mind (or prose) of W.G. Sebald elicits a similar reaction – at any rate, it is always a relief to step outside again ...”

“... her oratory because he ‘still needed to feel her presence’. His encounter with his godfather, Philip, duke of Burgundy, forced to take refuge in England after a storm in the Channel, saw Henry ‘treating him as the father he had always really wanted’. We learn that Paris ‘made a deep impression’ on Anne when she arrived there. Katherine of Aragon ...”

“... Monday 23 November 1953: Tonight I watched on television the departure of the Queen and Prince Philip from London Airport. It was immensely moving. The Queen looked so young and vulnerable and valiant, and Prince Philip so handsome and cheerful. A truly romantic couple, star quality in excelsis. True glamour without any ...”

“... or that the general lot of mankind is misery, and the misfortunes of those whose eminence drew upon them an universal attention have been more carefully recorded, because they were more generally observed, and have in reality been only more conspicuous than those of others, not more frequent, or more severe. The universal survey would become one of ...”

“... difference is no longer involuntary and fundamental but deliberately chosen. This seems to be what drew Dr Spacks to gossip as a theme for exploration. It is the handiest medium for deciding what sex you want to be. In practice, one suspects that men’s gossip is no different from that of women, although it may take pleasure in a masculine setting and ...”

“... depend on the support of aristocratic admirers like Blanche Dugdale (A.J. Balfour’s niece) and Philip Kerr, Lord Lothian; and he was delighted to play Burke to Harold Macmillan’s Lord Rockingham. Namier affected to despise all ideological ‘isms’ and A.J.P. Taylor spoke of his having taken the mind out of history. Professor Colley not only puts it ...”

“... the end of the performance, I was in tears (and so, incidentally, was my companion that afternoon, Philip Larkin, who admired her poems but who had, I think, never met her). The ‘hey-ho’ was in fact part of the tears. One merit of Frances Spalding’s excellent critical biography is that it helps to restore to Stevie Smith her dignity. Her earlier ...”

“... about Shippey’s book is the sympathy he brings to the Medieval literature upon which Tolkien drew, mounting to a brisk enthusiasm when, for example, Shippey explains how Tolkien reworked features of Old English poetry to spell out to modern readers things that an Anglo-Saxon would have known instinctively. But what is depressing about The Road to ...”

“... a dark green and set on a concrete plinth, marking the centre of another world. Five households drew water from it. Women came and went, came rattling between empty enamel buckets, went evenly away, weighed down by silent water. The horses came home to it in those first lengthening evenings of spring, and in a single draught emptied one bucket and then ...”