“... According to Henry James, reviewing John Cross’s life of George Eliot, the creations which brought her renown were of the incalculable kind, shaped themselves in mystery, in some intellectual back-shop or secret crucible, and were as little as possible implied in the aspect of her life. There is nothing more singular or striking in Mr Cross’s volumes than the absence of any indication, up to the time the Scenes of Clerical Life were published, that Miss Evans was a likely person to have written them; unless it be the absence of any indication, after they were published, that the deeply studious, concentrated, home-keeping Mrs Lewes was a likely person to have produced their successors ...”

“... with that of Christ himself (‘Was ever grief like Ours?’ he regally complains. Would Our Lord have used the royal ‘we’?). There are some particularly rich examples of this sort of semi-knowingly misattributed verse in the scant body of poems said to be written by James Graham, Marquis of Montrose, of which ...”

“... became German Kaiser, King of Prussia, Summus Episcopus of the Protestant Church and Supreme War Lord. There are precious few life-enhancing moments in this miserable saga, and Röhl milks the sheer awfulness with deadpan relish. If Wilhelm is presented as a monster in the making, he is surrounded by a cast of characters who act out of ...”

“... attributing the coinage to Simon Sebag Montefiore (elsewhere it is attributed to Professor James Matisoff, a celebrated coiner of neologisms). But however we wish to describe it, the phenomenon is achieved, if not quite without firing a shot, at least without the deployment of huge armies or indeed of organised nation states. Only briefly under the ...”

“... shouts: ‘A daughter pregnant at 16 and a son who’s queer, what did I ever do to the good Lord?’ The parents begin to police their son. The father pretends he could lose his job if his son’s homosexuality becomes known. The mother roots through the love letters her boy is receiving and throws them hysterically in his face. The narrator coolly ...”

“... and ‘popular’ literature became even more marked: ‘For every reader of Henry James and D.H. Lawrence,’ the publisher Michael Joseph observed in 1925, ‘there are a hundred readers of Nat Gould and Ethel M. Dell.’ And if we look further forward into the interwar period, the peaks of the popular market become higher still, especially ...”

“... to say camp’. Pevsner agreed: ‘very pretty’. It was the work of Paul Paget and John Seely, Lord Mottistone. In spirit, if not detail, it is heir to Colen Campbell’s Ebberston Hall near Scarborough: sprightly and miles away from Office of Works Georgian, RAF Neo-Georgian, War Office Georgian.Perhaps the Architecture of the Modern Age had already ...”

“... Sofia Andrukhovych, Neal Ascherson, Ilya Budraitskis, James Butler, Andrew Cockburn, Meehan Crist, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Peter Geoghegan, Jeremy Harding, Owen Hatherley, Abby Innes, Mimi Jiang, Thomas Jones, Laleh Khalili, Jackson Lears, Donald MacKenzie, Thomas Meaney, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Azadeh Moaveni, Jan-Werner Müller, Vadim Nikitin, Jacqueline Rose, Jeremy Smith, Daniel Soar, Olena Stiazhkina, Vera Tolz, Daniel Trilling Sofia Andrukhovychtranslated by Uilleam BlackerOn​  the first day, we hid in the Mins’ka metro station with our dog, Zlata ...”

“... the latest leaflet, or procuring another drink. And there were the Americans. I remember James Fenton noticing how they would cluster a little closer together and talk in a fashion slightly more intense. Mainly Rhodes or Fulbright scholars, they had come from every state of the union with what amounted to a free pass. The Yanks of Oxford were ...”

“... still shocking.In 1922 thousands had gathered to watch the new MPs take the night mail to London. James Maxton, the most charismatic of the group, assured the crowd that ‘they would see the atmosphere of the Clyde getting the better of the House of Commons.’ Maxton and his colleagues were members of the Independent Labour Party (until 1918 you couldn’t ...”

“... the New Model Army chaplain Hugh Peter, his sidekick ‘i’the Machiavilian world’: the future Lord Protector’s outsize red toper’s nose, a staple of royalist humour, eventually takes on celestial dimensions as a comet portending Charles’s doom. Cromwell’s avowed republicanism masks his aspirant despotism, the implication being that no avowal of ...”

“... well as a scholar,’ Norman said. ‘As a reward I’m going to let you hear my impersonation of Lord Beaverbrook. My ex-wife Jeannie Campbell was his daughter and he hated me. We just didn’t see eye to eye.’ He then impersonated the great English press baron at length. ‘I wouldn’t know,’ I said, ‘but I think that’s quite good.’ ‘Yeah, he ...”

“... and those under him were closely scrutinised for any tremulousness of the upper lip. James Murray, an eminent Scottish biologist who accompanied Fawcett’s 1911 expedition along the upper Heath River, was tested particularly harshly, being an interloper from the more showily dramatic – and better-funded – world of polar ...”

“... to ransom or murdered, usually by decapitation. Journalists who took the risk paid a heavy price: James Foley was kidnapped in November 2012 and executed by Islamic State in August 2014. Steven Sotloff was kidnapped in Aleppo in August 2013 and beheaded soon after Foley. But there is tremendous public demand to know what is happening in such places, and news ...”

“... formation, mass equine graves and summary executions, authors riding horses, and authors like Lord Berners painting horses (the horse is standing obediently inside his Oxfordshire manor). He discusses Stubbs’s 1762 portrait of the racehorse Whistlejacket, with its proto-modern background of empty brownish-grey (save for the cast shadows). This ...”