“... 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 ...”

“... I found it dirty and coarse,’ the Lebanese scholar Edward Atiyah wrote of Beirut at the end of the First World War. ‘Rubbish heaps stank in the streets; the gutters looked as though they hadn’t been cleaned since my childhood … Dead rats!’ Nearly a century later, in 2004, the journalist Hazim Saghie would say of Beirut in the 1980s: ‘I only recall darkness … the roar of electricity generators … while the garbage was mounting everywhere, spreading its putrid smell day after day after day ...”

“... review reached subscribers in Colorado. A few of his colleagues congratulated him, but most said nothing. Williams stayed there all day, Shields says, then went into his office and shut the door.Six years later, the same scene, complete with the door-shutting, which by then hinted more strongly at solitary drinking, played out again. The occasion was ...”

“... developed further. The Pre-Raphaelites had a similar impact on Morris. With Bloomsbury, Sharratt said that we might look at the avenue Keynes opened up by connecting economic theory with psychoanalysis. Sharratt’s argument was that though these groups might have been re-absorbed, they always left a subversive residue, a part maudite, which provided the ...”

“... and backbiting. Should he become more of a courtier and build on his ode sung at the Coronation of Edward VII (or rather, as he observed, not sung, by a choir which gawped at the King in the procession as he left the Abbey)? No, he found the boredom of Court life unendurable, and after he had stood night after night after dinner talking in the smoking-room his ...”

“... that Britain’s Prime Minister was a man who knew, and even relished war. The same could not be said of the two alternatives for the Premiership, Neville Chamberlain and Edward Halifax. ‘I was never meant to be a War Minister,’ Chamberlain told his sisters in October 1939, whereas Winston was ‘enjoying every moment ...”

“... 1 a.m. he arrived at his mother’s house in Chelsea. His elder brother opened the door and Wilde said: ‘Give me shelter, Willie. Let me lie on the floor or I shall die on the streets.’ Yeats, hearing of this, asked various Irish writers to give him letters of sympathy for Wilde and called at the house. Willie Wilde told Yeats he supposed they wanted his ...”

“... We travellers are in very hard circumstances,’ said Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. ‘If we tell anything new we are laughed at as fabulous.’ This mistrust of the footloose is endorsed by the trenchant definition of ‘traveller’s tale’ in Chambers’ Dictionary: ‘an astounding lie about what one professes to have seen abroad ...”

“... Phoenix?’ Thomson asks, and answers himself: ‘Just.’ James Franco – handsome, 32 – has said many times that River Phoenix inspired him to become an actor with his performance in Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho. Franco and Van Sant recently collaborated on an art film entitled My Own Private River; it’s currently screening at the Gagosian ...”

“... The author, Louise Story, had conducted a study at Yale in which many of those interviewed said that when they had children, they planned to cut back on work or stop working altogether. While administrators seemed alarmed by the trend, the students shrugged it off. ‘I’ll have a career until I have two kids,’ Angie Ku, at Yale, explained. ‘It ...”

“... their importance, their originality and their elegance. Rabies has Louis Pasteur, smallpox has Edward Jenner. Who has heard of Peter Panum? Even the book about the institution where he spent most of his career, S.E. Stybe’s Copenhagen University: Five Hundred Years of Science and Scholarship (1979), while acknowledging his importance as a founder of ...”