“... Early in the first part of his three-volume, 1500-page Portrait of the Man and His Work, A. David Moody, in a section of a chapter also entitled ‘Suburban Prejudice’, cites the same story, but points out that in the summers of 1902 and 1903 Homer Pound and his wife let their house to ‘Mr W.B. Hackenburg, president of the Jewish Hospital ...”

“... The discourse of human rights became popular only in the 1970s. Intellectuals, particularly in France, used it to replace their faith in socialism and Third Worldism, and to consecrate an anti-totalitarian liberalism. Politicians such as Jimmy Carter weaponised it in a new ideological and moral offensive against the Soviet Union. Moyn’s new book shows ...”

“... of whom owed their visibility and commercial platform directly to the revolutionary upheavals.France’s new exhibiting artists hadn’t learned to paint in a fortnight. Most of the sixty works they showed in 1791 must have been complete, or almost complete, before the National Assembly’s decree, and to produce them they must have undergone formal ...”

“... in August 1914, he volunteered, while still 17. His regiment was the Royal Artillery. He was in France and Flanders for four years, and was then invalided out suffering from trench feet.Enlisting in the Army may have had a special significance for him in that it related to an element in his heritage of which he was as proud as he was of its rabbinical ...”

“... suggests about as much as any other: ‘Our just is cause. We cannot lose. I am fighting for France, Liberty, and those three snakes hiding behind the curtain. Farewell, vis-à-vis Fifi D’Orsay. If my laundry comes, send it general delivery, care of Russia, and count it – I was a sock short last week.’ A memory of the three brothers all playing ...”

“... coaches and managers of the major world soccer teams, and all manner of celebrities, ranging from David Beckham to Charlize Theron. There has been much speculation about whether Diego Maradona will attend the draw. He has been banned from doing so after a recent foul-mouthed TV performance, judged to have brought the game into disrepute, but he is apparently ...”

“... of narrative, in other words, raises the problem of what, if anything, persists over time. David Hume thought for a while that nothing did; others have proposed the soul, the body, the brain and so on. Whatever the candidate, fictional narratives might help us to see continuity in ways other than the straightforwardly linear. What lends Middlemarch or ...”

“... working in some less restrained modern poetic structures, such as those of MacDiarmid or Auden or David Jones, but not in Shakespearean sonnets: ‘unvermiculated’, ‘penetralian’, ‘exuriate’, ‘cineritious’, ‘intercrural’, ‘rupetral concentricity’, ‘cerebellic souterrain’. ‘The Price of Stone’ reeks of the oil-lamp. Murphy’s ...”

“... a radical departure from the way we have traditionally viewed our reciprocal relationships. David Marquand, in what is properly the opening essay of the book, argues that hitherto the Left has been possessed by the same ‘reductionist individualism’ as the Right. The result was a ‘paradox’: social democracy could exist only within communitarian ...”

“... apart in time and space. Jews in Spain were flourishing when others were driven out of England or France; in Poland when they were driven out of Spain. Local catastrophes were sometimes commemorated by poems, in the fashion of ballads or broadsheets in England, events like an outbreak of plague in Prague and its Jewish(not its Christian) victims. On that ...”

“... like Britain it is jolly difficult to take on prejudice born of sheer fright. In Russia and in France they might just manage it! In both those countries they have a political élite, emanating, respectively, from the Communist Party and the Grandes Ecoles, who have the confidence to withstand what they would consider ill-informed prejudice. In Britain we ...”

“... it, was joining a political project that was already well underway (nowhere more so than in France) to analyse the nation in terms of measurable quantities: births, deaths and causes of death. Suicide was a useful case study for the sociologist, partly because it appeared on the face of it to be such a solitary phenomenon, but also because there was ...”

“... AD’, but that, in its very essence, time was now ‘man-made’ and ‘man-co-ordinated’. From David Landes’s work we know that in exactly the same year in which the Thirteen Colonies declared their Independence, London’s Gentlemen’s Magazine included this brief obituary for John Harrison: ‘He was the most ingenious mechanic, and received the ...”

“... not only explored alliances with Scotland and Ireland, but sent diplomatic missions urgently to France. Within two months a Franco-Welsh Treaty was signed. In 1405 a French force landed at Milford Haven and, combining with Welsh forces, headed for and captured Carmarthen. It then marched through South Wales into Herefordshire and the Midlands, halting only ...”

“... but there’s no indication that that is an informed opinion. Has he read (for example) David Marr’s Vision (1982)? Has he heard that there are honest-to-God theorems about the inference from one-dimensional retinal representations to representations of two-dimensional form; and from representations of two-dimensional form (and motion) to ...”