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“... self-satisfied French tradition of announcing and defining, Derrida must none the less be said to be spot-on about diaries. He says in Of Grammatology: ‘I can answer the threat of the other as other (than I) only by transforming it into another (than itself) through altering it in my imagination.’ I recalled these oracular words when browsing in ...”

“... rein’ at the first hint of fisticuffs. He quoted with appreciation R.B. Cunninghame Graham, who said that Shaw was ‘the first man to run away from Trafalgar Square on Bloody Sunday’. (Cunninghame Graham went to prison as a result of the riot.) This is all of a piece with Shaw, once the youthful Fenian, having not the smallest desire to live either in ...”

“... aching lumps of flesh, crushed together and wanting to be separate ...   ‘I’m hungry,’ said Rob. I laughed aloud in relief.   ‘You’re always hungry!’   ‘Yes, but now I could eat anything. I could eat Miss Gallagher.’    It was an old fantasy of ours. How would we cook her to make her edible? Long, slow roasting after a ...”

“... Maude alongside consensual modernisers sceptical of market-based solutions like Iain Macleod and Edward Heath. The diversity has continued: later members have included ostensible one-nation Tories – Kenneth Clarke, Michael Heseltine, Ian Gilmour – but also Keith Joseph and Nicholas Ridley. The politics of the Tory left were actually advanced in various ...”

“... Lauda was asked by the press why he hadn’t stopped to help. ‘I’m paid to race,’ he said, ‘not to stop.’ The ‘formula’ of F1 refers to the various rules governing the design of the cars laid down by the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile and intended to even out differences between the teams, but everyone knows that the ...”

“... Goodden’s biographical account makes little attempt to elaborate critically on what has been said already about the art, or to suggest that it has any greater depth than has generally been thought, but by discussing art and life together Goodden makes clear the extent to which the tension between appearance and reality in Kauffman’s paintings was ...”

“... with a few other things, then take the one you really wanted to the desk with some gesture that said, ‘Oh well, I might as well pick up this old thing too.’ I hoped the volume was going to be Richard Bentley’s 1711 edition of Horace, which is full of his sometimes inspired and sometimes not so inspired conjectural emendations. When I got it home I ...”

“... office for a relatively short time over a long political career, largely because of what he said, or the way he said it. The ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech of 1968 ended his front-bench career and remains a focus of scrutiny. It was the speech at once of a politician on the stump and a classicist on the ...”

“... was thought grubby and generally pretty hopeless, but they remained friends, and Phineas Finn is said to be partly based on Sir William. Marriage to a man born in 1817 and, in his time, so eminent, must have improved Lady Gregory’s knowledge of history. In his youth her husband had turned down Peel’s offer of the post of Irish Lord of the Treasury, and ...”

“... his cameraman, and offer subtle direction to his actors (‘If you would just come now,’ he once said calmly when a camera was threatening to overheat). Often he would star in his productions himself. Alfred Kinsey’s cinematic oeuvre first came to light in 1972 when Wardell Pomeroy, who worked for Kinsey and had taken down 8000 of the 18,000 sex histories ...”

“... of it as a work of art.’ This has the virtue of simplicity, but there is surely more to be said, if not about Kant, then about the terms ‘art’ and ‘work’, the first long associated with skills of every sort and the second with the results of their application; for example, Prospero’s ‘art’ was magic, and what the magic accomplished was ...”

“... down. The Arabs’ defeat haunted him and much later, in A History of the Arab Peoples (1991), he said of the triumph of European colonialism in the Near East: ‘Defeat goes deeper into the human soul than victory. To be in someone else’s power is a conscious experience which induces doubts about the ordering of the universe.’ Hourani’s hopes for an ...”

“... just £50 each time there was a revised British edition. ‘Historicall truths,’ Adam Smith said in 1763, ‘are now in much greater request than they ever were in the ancient times.’ He surmised that was because there were ‘now severall sects in Religion and politicall disputes which are greatly dependent on the truth of certain facts’. He was ...”

“... that every manuscript should be published,’ Elie Wiesel, the founder of the project, has said. Under Two Dictators is being reissued now after being out of print for fifty years. It is a significant account for historians because it was written so soon after the war, because it describes imprisonment under both Hitler and Stalin, and because it pays ...”

“... who started work on Homegoing when she was twenty and published it when she was 26, has said she wanted to stretch ‘a different muscle’ in her second book by staying with a single character for the duration of a novel. Transcendent Kingdom alternates between glimpses of Gifty’s adult life and memories of her childhood in the Alabama town of ...”