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“... the resources of the Empire in the national interest, they ran it as a branch of Toynbee Hall. Instead of adapting the educational system to fit the requirements of a nation competing for markets, they indulged in the fraudulent exercise, much trumpeted by Classics dons, of liberal humanism for the masses. Part One of the Barnett Report dealt with ...”

“... hear the words. But music in such a mood could not, I think, encourage mugging or bar-room, dance-hall brawls, as rock music can – not unless the rhythm, the beat, is changed, to parody the original. Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange pretended that a lively-eared punk could be turned on to street violence by Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’: but plain readers ...”

“... have an integrity and persistence of their own. Academic historians such as Maurice Cowling and John Vincent have for years been plotting the political seduction of the aspiring middle classes into primrose leagues. It was all in Bagehot anyway. Similarly it is striking, but in some ways rather pathetic, to discover a Marxist such as Philip Corrigan ...”

“... by the warmth of Rousseau’s gratitude, and Rousseau was briefly exquisitely happy with Wootton Hall in Staffordshire, rented to him by Richard Davenport for a pittance. Then he took it into his head that Hume was mocking him behind his back; he also decided that Hume had been subsidising his stay in England, and of all the things calculated to render ...”

“... make possible the creation of the Roman Catholic Cathedral of Westminster, the masterpiece of John Francis Bentley, opened in 1903 and consecrated in 1910.Barry recognises the significance of the cathedral, even though it is consigned to his epilogue. More than 120 coloured stones from at least two dozen countries can be found there, some of them ...”

“... Robert never saw him again. His older brother, heir to the family property, including Stratford Hall, later earned the nickname ‘Black Horse’ for his transgressions: first, he seduced and impregnated his wife’s teenage sister (the baby died in suspicious circumstances); then he defrauded her family and fled to Paris. Robert was raised by his mother ...”

“... satire novel, tragicomic melodramatic epistolary lyrical); rhetoric (Homeric Pickwickian, music hall biblical, kinky political). He is credited by the OED with coining the term ‘poetism’, which suggests his misgivings about what poetry had the potential to become as well as his willingness to screw up his own aspirations to poetical effect. But screwing ...”

“... was assassinated. A few months later white paramilitaries smashed their way into the negotiating hall and roughed up the delegates when they heard that the proposal of a white volkstaat had been rejected. Coalitions were formed among various factions in order to stage a walk-out, and those who remained had to address the real possibility that many of the ...”

“... secret negotiations ensued.Stettheimer’s painting imagines such a merger in the Met’s Great Hall, with museum directors, trustees, critics and dealers (her ‘victims’, as she called them) lining the grand staircase. A naked baby appears as a symbol of contemporary art: at the foot of the stairs, a photographer (George Platt Lynes) zaps the scribbling ...”

“... did not appear until 1837 and was quickly supplanted by two popularising and very popular works, John Forster’s The Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith (1848) and Washington Irving’s Life of Oliver Goldsmith (1849). Forster and Irving built on Prior’s research to reinstate – affectionately, but still damagingly – the simple, unworldly ...”

“... perhaps the most like Grendel’s arm after Beowulf tears it off and hangs it up in Hrothgar’s hall: huge, a bit of a mess, and, in its vastness, terrifying to contemplate. The earliest discussions call this kind of verse ‘melic’ (the Greek melos means ‘song’), and roughly distinguish sung poems from epic and tragedy. Aristotle, who had a strong ...”

“... to possession of my fantasy library. Some of the books were hard going – I never got on with Hall Caine or Jeffery Farnol – but there was enough enjoyable reading there to keep me busy for quite a while. A couple of years later, a generous Welsh bibliophile my parents knew gave me the first forty volumes of the Edinburgh Review, along with Foxe’s ...”

“... Museum) and the National Gallery. Piero della Francesca was a figure of special interest for both John Charles Robinson, an agent for South Kensington as well as for private collectors, and Charles Eastlake, the first director of the National Gallery, because of the extreme rarity of his portable pictures. There was only one work by him in any public – or ...”

“... the new Trade Center complex, it will surely feature one of the world’s tallest buildings. City Hall has slashed social assistance programmes, closed fire stations, raised train and bus fares and introduced hefty property and income tax increases to eliminate a projected $5 or $6 billion budget deficit, but local leaders are still proposing to use public ...”

“... ideas while obscuring his overt possession of them. That he chooses to read a fiction in a lecture hall rather than a lecture enables him to pose the unspeakable instead of talking about the impossibility of speaking it. Last year he and I took part in a conference in Holland on the problem of evil. The participants fumbled around with the primary grotesquerie ...”