“... what was not harmonious’. She also wrote that the 19th-century novel was ‘a Judaised novel: George Eliot and Dickens and Tolstoy were all touched by the Jewish covenant: they wrote of conduct and the consequences of conduct: they were concerned with a society of will and commandment’. Auden said that he had within him a ‘mad clergyman’, who often ...”

“... vignettes like Chatwin’s, humorous and on occasion startling. The best of them are memorable. Michael Ignatieff watches Chatwin ‘like an old baboon’ under a mulberry tree in the south of France, having his hair combed by his wife. The ravenous Francis Wyndham and James Fox spoon up a pitifully notional soufflé made from wild strawberries which they ...”

“... hacked about and generally sanitised before becoming the manifesto. The idea, I gather, was that Michael Foot himself was to do the job ... But either he was caught short by Mrs Thatcher’s abrupt decision, or had simply forgotten, or had found it all too much for him; at any event he arrived without anything to show, and the document simply became the ...”

“... The age of true Classicism in painting was over before Victoria’s accession: Ingres, as Michael Greenhalgh has lately pointed out, was no true Classicist. The Grecising pictures of the Leightons and the Alma Tademas employ Greek decor, but are in temper, as in quality, singularly unhellenic. Another domain in which we encounter much Greek decor, but ...”

“... germane to their investigation and must be exhaustively scrutinised before being ruled out. George Eliot talked about the human need to filter, lest madness ensue: ‘If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the ...”

“... of ’62.* Reading them, I immediately wondered about the figure for Glasgow, and I found it in Michael Pacione’s history of the city. There were 97,000 houses in Glasgow awaiting demolition at that time, mostly crumbling tenements, more than half of them without an inside bath and with a loo on the stairs.Just west of Glasgow Royal Infirmary and the ...”

“... people who identified themselves as ‘English’, 32.4 million chose that as their sole identity. Michael Ashcroft’s referendum-day poll found that 79 per cent of people who described themselves as ‘English not British’ voted Leave. But there is less evidence for the claim that the English voted for, or currently want, constitutional change. Despite the ...”

“... was partly because since Feuerbach, the concept of humanity itself had been secretly theological. George Eliot was a devout believer in what was then known as the Religion of Humanity. God had been dethroned by an equally exotic, infinitely capacious creature known as Man. Since Christianity has rather a lot to say about God becoming Man, this smacked more of ...”

“... as some of its recent practitioners like to think (he mentions as precursors Maurice Cowling and Michael Bentley), but he gives one of the most impressive proofs to date of its potential to open up understanding of ideological messaging, the importance of which in British politics has seldom been adequately recognised, and has sometimes been virtually ...”

“... this reprint. That’s the kind of silly stuff only you can like.’ It was a review of a book by George Kingsley Zipf, an eccentric Harvard scholar, whose eponymous law concerns word frequencies in any language. For written English, the most frequent word (rank 1), ‘the’, will occur approximately twice as often as the second most frequent word (rank ...”

“... to the invasion of Afghanistan. Some promoters of the liberal Kantian project – for example, Michael Ignatieff – have gone further, embracing the invasion of Iraq as a muscular extension of normative human rights, and in some cases dreaming of yet more humanitarian assaults on targets from Khartoum to Tehran. Victors’ Justice, a collection of seven ...”

“... followed their example,’ he said in the State of the Union speech. One supportive commentator, Michael Lind of Salon, called the new strategy, with its stress on agility and flexibility, ‘the greatest revolution in American foreign policy in a generation’. Yet the president’s words have a familiar ring. In September 1999 ...”

“... world still permeate the forest. He remembers school excursions to the New Forest with his friend George Peterken, and how he was taken by Peterken, now a famous woodland ecologist, to see the small-leaved limes of St Briavel’s Common, which creep along the banks ‘like the walking wood in Macbeth’. He even tells the story of the veneering in Jaguar ...”

“... Hegel, Nietzsche and on to Hitler. Gay, along with other German émigré historians, such as George Mosse and Fritz Stern, helped change all that by pointing to the variegated hue and social implications of cultural symbols. He was fond of describing his effort as the social history of ideas. Born in Berlin in 1923, fortunate emigrant to the United ...”

“... alternative to work, was quickly eradicated. And there was a new iteration under David Cameron and George Osborne, in the form of austerity. The hypothesis of ‘expansionary fiscal contraction’, touted by Osbornites during the first years of the coalition government, is that cuts to public spending can lead to economic growth, by creating more opportunities ...”