“... to a wide audience. Most publishers’ contracts have a clause about cartoon rights: let’s hope Gellner hasn’t signed his away. We literary critics are wiser. For us, seamless textuality makes the world, from Mallarmé to the News at Ten, indeterminate. Having read Rorty, we know that Freud’s a ‘strong poet’ and that, swerve and dribble as we ...”

“... dreadfully unnerving to the young. Several virgins of my acquaintance went directly astray in the hope of becoming great dancers – a mistaken notion.’ One can see why virgins went astray. It is a splendid book, an inspiring book, doors and windows and eyes and arms wide open to the world (‘according to legend,’ de Mille says of Duncan’s childhood ...”

“... Stravinsky to Antibes (he didn’t come) to tutor her husband in harmony. (For a while, with no hope of succeeding on Broadway and still struggling to find his musical direction, Porter studied harmony, counterpoint and orchestration at the Schola Cantorum in Paris.) Linda’s first husband, also a Yalie, had the dubious distinction of being the first man ...”

“... In Ireland, for example, the cattle trade had been crippled by a British embargo from the days of Charles II. As well as the denial of religious and political rights, Burke inveighed against the restrictions on the export of linen, wool and beer which the Irish Parliament had been strong-armed to pass into law. Such impositions remind us of the ‘Unequal ...”

“... cheer Duke Leopold II of Tuscany subsequently made their way to the Piedmontese legation to cheer Charles Albert, the king of Sardinia-Piedmont, and finally, with their spirits fired up, marched into the Piazza Venezia, where the Austrian legation was situated. As the foreign overlords of Lombardy and Venetia and the conservative Catholic hegemon on the ...”

“... of Jefferson for president and Aaron Burr for vice. They outpolled Adams and his running mate, Charles Pinckney, but in order for Jefferson to become president, one or more Republican electors had to avoid voting for Burr. They failed to get the message. Jefferson and Burr both ended up with 73 electoral votes, sending the contest to the House of ...”

“... abolition of slavery; the Indian liberal Dadabhai Naoroji criticised ‘un-British rule’ in the hope of realising the economic prosperity that ‘true British rule’ promised. When such approaches were rebuffed, anticolonialism and independence gradually came to seem the more likely route towards self-rule and equality. But as late as the interwar period ...”

“... that very ugly skirmish with the dragoon Masi, probably instigated by the authorities in the hope of dislodging the Gamba family and their radical English associates from that part of Italy – could have done with more and sharper attention. In some ways, the second half of Seymour’s biography, dealing with Mary Shelley’s life between her ...”

“... In 1629, King Charles I granted the Massachusetts Bay Company a standard commercial charter containing a clerical slip that changed the world. The document charged the stockholders with duly electing a board of management – a governor and 18 assistants – and holding them to account at quarterly meetings. However, crown officials failed to specify where the company headquarters should be (London would have been the usual assumption) and the wily leaders of the company absconded to New England, where they transformed quarterly meetings into government sessions, stockholders into freemen, assistants into magistrates, the governor into a Governor, and then piously declared their new regime to be ‘a city on a hill’ ready to serve as a model of divinely inspired governance for the rest of the world (well, for England, which came to the same thing ...”

“... anonymous consumers of pornography, and the Holy Roman Emperor. Correggio’s Loves were given to Charles V by Federico Gonzaga; Perino’s tapestries were woven for his visit to Genoa, and the gallery of Francis I was hurriedly completed for Charles’s visit in 1539. To a remarkable degree the audience for all these ...”

“... stereotypes himself as the grammar-school boy perverted by his ‘milieu’ (fellow-con Charles Richardson’s Open University-speak), Boyle creates an extraordinarily vivid and well-written portrait of the criminal as a young urchin. It is done without nostalgia, posing or special pleading. The childhood chapters are far and away the best thing in ...”

“... would suffice (the tunic Mary wore at the annunciation is preserved at Chartres). In 1267, Charles II, count of Provence, dug up the bones in Vézelay that local tradition held were Mary Magdalene’s and took the left foot to St-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume; thirteen years later he dug them up again and this time found a piece of ‘living skin’ – said ...”

“... six-month journey via Rhodes and Athens, but stayed outside the sacred boundary of the city in the hope of being granted a formal triumph. He was, once again, disappointed. By now, Pompey and Caesar had broken with each other: in 50, Pompey, after much vacillation, had sided with senatorial hardliners in demanding that Caesar lay down his command and return to ...”

“... and outlives the majority of human passions: Dante’s is one of those which one can only just hope to grow up to at the end of life.’ Moreover, Eliot was sceptical about the capacity of style to preserve dead subject-matter. Discussing journalism in his essay ‘Charles Whibley’, he writes: ‘literary style is ...”

“... used the seductive physical power of music with the intensity and the range of Mozart,’ says Charles Rosen in The Classical Style. Glenn Gould thought Mozart’s music was ‘hedonist’. The immediacy of Mozart’s music can be spooky. That simple four-note figure repeated twice, the viola motif in the slow movement of the G minor String ...”