“... are taken with great seriousness. This might seem obvious: but we ought perhaps to be a little more surprised than we generally are at the extent to which almost total ignorance as to what is going on in the other of these two philosophical communities is no barrier to advancement and distinction in either of them. For this fact at least suggests the ...”

“... that are exempted from stay at home orders. A subway worker told the New York Times that he felt more sacrificial than essential.On 25 May, at the intersection of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue, Floyd asphyxiated while being pressed into the road under the weight of law enforcement. His dying was watched by passers-by and recorded on mobile phones. Those of ...”

“... with sources. In addition to official documents, chroniclers such as Henry Knighton, Adam Usk, Thomas Walsingham and Jean Froissart wrote detailed narratives, partisan but not of one mind. For obvious reasons, their histories focus on the nobility. Although England was a precociously centralised realm with a sophisticated bureaucracy, it had neither a ...”

“... of the war,’ she thinks, and in any case nothing much happened there in the period she covers. More surprising is that in the first third of the book there isn’t a word about Serbia. The assassination of the archduke in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 goes by in two sentences, one of which, a quotation from the oracular Bismarck, may be all she needs: ‘some ...”

“... suspicion to which Communism gave birth – and this is becoming less and less obvious and more and more difficult to recognise – makes it difficult for anyone to analyse the history of the past century and to utter words that mean what they mean.’ It’s a difficulty that he overcomes as well as anyone can. This ...”

“... Ben-Amos then focuses on the discussions that were involved in the organisation of each of more than a hundred state funerals. A prospective funeral went through an elaborate legislative and executive process (at one of three possible honorific levels) from first mooting to final staging, and in that sense these ceremonies were political events. There ...”

“... the attention of teachers and taught; that the literature of the past two hundred years alone is more than enough challenge for the three short years of undergraduate life. One accepts, too, that things were not helped by a tradition in teaching the history of the language that was more than a little offputting, even for ...”

“... the earth wouldn’t be warm enough to support life as we know it. But there is now far more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than there has been at any point in the last 800,000 years (we know this because researchers have analysed air bubbles trapped in the ice in Greenland and Antarctica: the deeper you go, the older the bubbles). The ...”

“... Eva was determined to build in the nearby suburb of Dölzschen. All of these worries, and many more besides, were recorded in voluminous detail in the diaries he kept all his life. One of the interesting oddities of Klemperer’s diaries is the way in which the new worries brought by Nazi oppression slipped in beside the old worries of a man for whom ...”

“... in which past racial inequalities continue to affect America today. But his less convincing and more doctrinaire efforts, such as the 17,000-word ‘The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration’, which appeared in September, seem to be powered by a diffuse sense of outrage in ardent search of an affront. He presumes to speak on behalf of ‘the black ...”

“... Merciless Parliament of 1388, from which Chaucer’s former boss Brembre went to the gallows and Thomas Usk, one of the few people in the period who did mention Chaucer as a poet, to the more dreadful fate of hanging, drawing and beheading – he changed sides (to Chaucer’s) too soon and too prominently. The effect of ...”

“... Though she never married the Frog Prince of whom she was teasingly fond, or any of her other and more handsome suitors, she lived for a long time in peace and prosperity, governed her kingdom well, repelled its enemies and won the hearts and praise of most of her subjects. She has never really died. This is at once the stuff of fairytale, and it is ...”

“... outside St David’s Station, Exeter and a wry postcard, long ago, from Stanford, as well as more substantial talks. He was Donald Davie, who was born in Barnsley in 1922 and died in Devon last autumn, a precise and passionate poet and critic, the Empson or the Eliot of his generation. Or rather, he would have been the Empson or Eliot of his ...”

“... surprisingly frank about her failings; and her comments on the failings of some hotels and more or less identifiable restaurants, doctors and nurses are equally frank and usually entertaining. Wives may, as in this book, be a little too reverential when they write about their husbands. There is, however, some criticism here. Early in their marriage she ...”

“... it would be a four-year-long bloodbath: Never such innocence, Never before or since. And, more recently, Samuel Hynes’s magisterial A War Imagined (1990) argues that the generation of poets, painters and novelists who lived through the war ‘rejected the values of the society’ that had sent them to fight and rendered their ‘sense of a gap in ...”