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“... or that the general lot of mankind is misery, and the misfortunes of those whose eminence drew upon them an universal attention have been more carefully recorded, because they were more generally observed, and have in reality been only more conspicuous than those of others, not more frequent, or more severe. The universal survey would become one of ...”

“... difference is no longer involuntary and fundamental but deliberately chosen. This seems to be what drew Dr Spacks to gossip as a theme for exploration. It is the handiest medium for deciding what sex you want to be. In practice, one suspects that men’s gossip is no different from that of women, although it may take pleasure in a masculine setting and ...”

“... depend on the support of aristocratic admirers like Blanche Dugdale (A.J. Balfour’s niece) and Philip Kerr, Lord Lothian; and he was delighted to play Burke to Harold Macmillan’s Lord Rockingham. Namier affected to despise all ideological ‘isms’ and A.J.P. Taylor spoke of his having taken the mind out of history. Professor Colley not only puts it ...”

“... the end of the performance, I was in tears (and so, incidentally, was my companion that afternoon, Philip Larkin, who admired her poems but who had, I think, never met her). The ‘hey-ho’ was in fact part of the tears. One merit of Frances Spalding’s excellent critical biography is that it helps to restore to Stevie Smith her dignity. Her earlier ...”

“... about Shippey’s book is the sympathy he brings to the Medieval literature upon which Tolkien drew, mounting to a brisk enthusiasm when, for example, Shippey explains how Tolkien reworked features of Old English poetry to spell out to modern readers things that an Anglo-Saxon would have known instinctively. But what is depressing about The Road to ...”

“... a dark green and set on a concrete plinth, marking the centre of another world. Five households drew water from it. Women came and went, came rattling between empty enamel buckets, went evenly away, weighed down by silent water. The horses came home to it in those first lengthening evenings of spring, and in a single draught emptied one bucket and then ...”

“... in school room and another in larder, but nothing seen of poor Sally.’ From an early age she drew compulsively and documented her animals living and dead. She was attached to them, but not sentimental. When pets died, or were chloroformed to put an end to their suffering, they were boiled down so that she and Bertie could draw the skeletons. This was ...”

“... of John Aubrey’s 17th-century writing. ‘My great Uncle … remembred him,’ Aubrey wrote of Philip Sidney, dead for three generations, ‘and sayd that he was wont, as he was hunting on our pleasant plaines, to take his Table booke out … and write downe his notions as they came into his head when he was writing his Arcadia.’ Searching for memories ...”

“... but rather to what he calls the ‘master-slave dialectic’. Viewed in this way, cuissage drew on a metaphorical language of sexual possession to underscore the threat of domination, and pretended to enact an ‘erotics of inequality’. More specifically, it articulated a discourse of seigniorial privilege which was part of a system of power and was ...”

“... Much of this is standard Neoplatonist stuff, by no means unique to Berkeley; it’s just that he drew some startling epistemological consequences from it. There had always been a certain aversion to materialism in Irish thought, and Berkeley simply presses it to a logical if implausible end-point, abolishing matter altogether. What replaces ...”

“... Collected Poems (reprinted here as an appendix), his neat-minded friend Walter de la Mare drew attention to Thomas’s ‘loose-woven’ style, a wonderful epithet which simultaneously conjures up the Thomas of tweeds, pipes and trousers tucked in socks, and his verse, written in a form both ‘fixed and free’, which enacts Thomas’s encounters ...”

“... weeks while hidden in the Wartburg, a castle in Eisenach, between 1521 and 1522. His close ally Philip Melanchthon was the more able Hellenist; he was awarded the first chair of Greek at the University of Wittenberg from 1518 and put his learning in service of the Reformation.Crusius was a generation younger than Luther and Melanchthon. Born in 1526, he was ...”

“... in the New York Times, ‘Jewish writers – Bernard Malamud, J.D. Salinger, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, inter alia – have emerged as a dominant movement in our literature. Herzog, in several senses, is the great pay-off book of that movement. It is a masterpiece, the first the movement has produced.’ Herzog not only had critics whirling their ...”

“... Jolting miserably over the rough terrain, he began to wail. This – the thing I describe – drew a crowd. For his plight grew worse, yet his shouts were in a foreign language, desperately begging his ‘master’s mercy’. His funny way of talking made them laugh. His bodily contours, his fat suggested something alien, animal, Babylonian, gross. So the ...”

“... of its unconstitutionality but from Jacobite treason. By the same token, his Lord Chief Justice, Philip Hardwicke, was more concerned to link a crime wave in the 1730s with ‘the degeneracy of the present times, fruitful in the inventions of wickedness’, than with widespread human want and desperation. And there is an almost comical petulance in one ...”