“... Then, in Mansfield Park, these words start being used in a new way. The stiff pater familias, Sir Thomas Bertram, returns from Antigua to find that his niece Fanny has progressed from ugly duckling to swan. He can’t help perceiving ‘in a grand and careless way’ that the thoroughly eligible Henry Crawford – rich, elegant, every inch a gentleman – is ...”

“... Victorian historians vied with each other to compose panegyrics to him. The biography written by Thomas Hughes, the author of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, said that Alfred disproved once and for all the thesis that Christianity was ‘no faith for fighters’: while the Vikings at Ashdown passed the night before the battle singing the ‘Death-Song of Ragnar ...”

“... state. The State of Nature, meanwhile, was itself a site of conflict. The reductive party, with Thomas Hobbes at its head, saw human motivation as entirely egoistic at root (Hobbes’s problem was to explain how a mass of competing egos came up in the end with a system of law which protects the weak multitude). Locke’s State of Nature was much less ...”

“... few persons,’ Anthony Powell wrote in John Aubrey and His Friends (1948), ‘of whom it would be more true to say that they were interested in everything.’ Aubrey, born in Wiltshire, attended Trinity College, Oxford in the 1640s, but his studies were interrupted by the rumble of civil war. He watched squadrons of soldiers train in New College gardens. He ...”

“... In recent years, nothing has done more to reinforce the European sense of cultural superiority than the sight of America’s televangelists. Easily stereotyped as politically reactionary, sexually hypocritical, intellectually retarded and financially dishonest, the televangelists confirmed every prejudice about American society ...”

“... Jane, too. He wrote, he says, with his heart’s blood. The physiological contribution would be more realistically seen as his digestive juices. He distrusted the world of literary evaluation, did not see how a man could honestly live by writing, and yet had to write. In February 1835, he asserts that he has sold nothing for 23 months, yet in March when the ...”

“... on manners; in paintings and novels. In his introductory essay to the first of these books, Keith Thomas proposes that the cultural historian should reconstruct from such evidence the ‘grammar of gesture’, as part of a larger attempt to define ‘all the codes and conventions which create the context for meaningful behaviour in the society under ...”

“... the air’: yet it conveyed the view, subsequently shared by many, that with Eden the facade was more important than the interior, the appearance more impressive than the reality. People recognised his ability as a negotiator, skilfully handling diplomatic problems with the support of the Foreign Office, but it was widely ...”

“... the world was smallpox-free, surveillance went on for two years after his illness. There were no more ‘natural’ cases and on 8 May 1980, Resolution WHA33.3 was signed at the eighth plenary meeting of the 33rd World Health Assembly. It declared that ‘the world and all its people’ had ‘won freedom from smallpox . . . which only a decade ago was ...”

“... how to make and use such texts. Katherine Storm Hindley’s Textual Magic rests on a catalogue of more than 1100 recipes (unfortunately the link to its accompanying online database is currently broken – send prayers to Isidore of Seville, patron saint of the internet). With this corpus of evidence, Hindley reveals the ways medieval people imagined the ...”

“... separated me from John’s secretary, the formidable RoseMarie Terenzio. John depended on no one more than RoseMarie. ‘Here’s the deal,’ I’d hear her say, before the door to John’s office slammed shut.San Diego or Chicago? That was the question presented to the editors by John soon after I joined. The Republican convention would be in ...”

“... What can have possessed Graham Greene? The answer, I suspect, is the ghost of Thomas Mann. The Swiss setting of Doctor Fischer of Geneva might be determined by some generic effluvium of Mann, a compound of his Magic (Swiss) Mountain, his post-war return to Switzerland and, perhaps, his rather landlocked position at the centre of European letters ...”

“... I knew no one at all who lived in the Palisades. Of course I knew the Mann house – the house Thomas Mann built in 1942 and inhabited until he left America a decade later – and had stayed there a few years ago. The house has been bought and refurbished by the German state.When, in the late 1980s, the Germans acquired the nearby Villa Aurora, the house ...”

“... episode made me turn later to Buchan’s Life of Cromwell to refresh my memory of the character of Thomas, Lord Fairfax, who, like Greene, had friends in both political camps. Turning idly to the seemingly unpromising character of Cromwell himself, I could not help being struck by the aptness to Greene of phrase after phrase in Buchan’s final appraisal of ...”

“... and Katherine Philips, concentrates entirely on novelists. This is unwise, because there were more first-rate women poets than novelists in the period, and because poetry was still the place where ideas were growing most vigorously. Spender sees the importance of letter-writing as an approved activity for girls, but doesn’t follow this up by examining ...”