“... unhappily for Hexter, and not only, as our author claims, because of the work of Hans Baron and Paul Oskar Kristeller. I will go so far as to say that the idea of the Renaissance was big enough and strong enough to do without the rejuvenating serum administered to it, with the best of intentions, by these two excellent historians. In fact, it is economic ...”

“... a shadowy resemblance between him and Rougue, the hero of one of his own tales reprinted here, a man of catholic tastes who can be found at various times ‘sipping incessantly from a bottle of the most fiery liquers’, drinking ‘a vast drought’ of ‘raw brandy’, ‘be[taking] himself with vast zeal and fervour to the keg of rum’ and swallowing ...”

“... in the town in 1946. I knew some of these people: Dan Bolger, for example, whose grandfather, Paul, had donated money in 1846. Dan Bolger had a shop in the town. It was hard to think of him, or any of these people, having grandparents who knew ‘bitter hunger, starvation and death’. Most of them had inherited property and exuded a certain ...”

“... for physical martyrdom, he, with the rest of his countrymen, will work indoors. The house, where man is born, and married, and dies, becomes his theatre, and the sun shines as well, if sometimes more indirectly, on the indoor as on the outdoor man.’ Sickert enjoyed making pronouncements – his most recent ...”

“... King wanted to move palaces, he would not go through Paris, but had a path cut through the Bois de Boulogne, which was known afterwards as ‘the Riot Road’. It would be a stretch of the imagination to say that the events of the spring of 1750 prefigure those of the Revolutionary spring of 1789. But their quality of strangeness, their dark undertow of ...”

“... statement: ‘There is nothing clever or smart about being incomprehensible. The ordinary man in the street has his rights, just as the toffee-nosed élitists in Hampstead have theirs.’Other People was discussed in at least four broadcasts, two on radio (Kaleidoscope, Critics’ Forum), and two on TV (The South Bank Show, Did you see?), the second ...”

“... creation of a head of ‘story development’. The post of official fabulist was filled by Paul Hamill, who would play an inglorious role in the fabrication of the Dodgy Dossier of September 2002.We weren’t careful what we half-wished for. We did not anticipate the effects a free-flowing, direct, 24/7 style of communication would have on the quality ...”

“... as a political one, a lifeline to the corporate base of the fraying New Deal coalition: military de-escalation would free up public revenue for productive investment and tamp down the inflationary pressures that scared the bond managers of multinational banks, while the normalisation of international relations would open the USSR, Eastern Europe and China ...”

“... audience including, presumably, many straight readers. Perhaps a few more gay male writers – Paul Monette, David Leavitt and Armistead Maupin in the US, Alan Hollinghurst, Paul Bailey, Adam Mars-Jones in Britain – enjoy this crossover status. International comparisons, however, can be misleading, since they disguise ...”

“... or met almost everyone, cut a strikingly beautiful figure, became Exhibit A for Imagism. In The Man Who Died, D. H. Lawrence figured her as the Priestess of Isis. Follow as she travels to Greece on a boat with Havelock Ellis, finds herself in Egypt just when King Tut’s tomb is opened, gets photographed by Man Ray, has ...”

“... and hindsight, would find questionable. Pre-modern reasoning was more deductive than inductive: man was the measure of all things, geocentricity sidelined the sun and unseen forces were morally reflexive, harnessed to turbulent inner lives. These forces were personified as angels and demons and reified in the shape of heinous sinners, including heretics and ...”

“... art that would stand in a more intimate and vital relationship to the world of nature and to the man-made social environment’. (Smithson made arrangements of different-sized bins filled with varieties of stones or sand.) Nor does he like the work of Charles Simonds, who had films made of himself naked, lying, or writhing about, in clay – a ‘telltale ...”

“... the stern and reactionary Gregory XVI. The old pope had died at the age of eighty; the new man, who adopted the name Pius IX, was 54, with a warm personality and a cheerful, winning manner. Whereas Gregory had begun his reign in 1831 with a campaign of violent repression, Pius’s first official act was to proclaim a blanket amnesty for the political ...”

“... of the Industrial Revolution. To Marx and Engels Owenism was merely a moralistic utopian cul-de-sac in the pre-history of scientific socialism. Whigs, Marxists and Fabians have generally concurred in consigning the Owenites to History’s old curiosity shop. Robert Owen, wrote the Webbs, was a political ‘simpleton’ who had ‘inflated’ the working ...”

“... a famous and idealised older woman fails to live up to the needs of a younger protégée it is de rigueur nowadays for the latter to rage in print at the cruelty of her faithless idol. Mommie Dearest (1978), Christina Crawford’s high-kitsch account of her wretched childhood with her adoptive mother Joan Crawford, is the archetype here – the first and ...”