“... it didn’t serve Stettheimer well in the end. Ettie, the only Stettheimer who wrote books, may have anticipated what kind of diary would support scholarship worthy of her sister. Rather than seeing her as a bitter prude ripping out pages by the fistful, we might see her as judiciously removing the sex and gossip that have distracted from the work of ...”

“... argued that African Americans – ‘especially if we are potential writers’ – may be ‘more than ordinarily concerned’ with the associations their names carry with them.Everett was born in Georgia and raised in South Carolina. He studied with the logician Howard Pospesel at the University of Miami, where he read Frege, Wittgenstein and ...”

“... settled at Olympia by a process of arbitration. A seated Zeus, a judge rather than a warrior, may have held special appeal for the people of Elis, who administered the site. Olympia’s excavation records show a huge number of metal weights inscribed with dedications to Zeus, far more than have been found elsewhere in Greece. Perhaps, Barringer ...”

“... making him ‘among the very richest people’ in Europe. Despite this, he died, to use Theresa May’s phrase, a ‘citizen of nowhere’, and his estate, as Jessica Marglin details in this absorbing microhistory, became the subject of celebrated lawsuits.Shamama was born in the hāra, the old Jewish quarter of Tunis. His family were influential but ...”

“... to Basing House, where he and what was left of his straggling army licked their wounds. On 21 May the victor, Waller, once again lined up Basing House in his sights but was ordered to Oxford instead. Still in the area, however, was Colonel Richard Norton. In the first week of June the Royalist garrison was catastrophically ambushed by Norton while out on ...”

“... reads this, or as he would probably prefer to say, if he has this ‘drawn to his attention’, he may care to know that more than one of the guests gave me separate but identical accounts of his conduct at this soirée. He evidently has a knack of inspiring affection and loyalty in his friends.) Now, I am merely a lone scribe living on my depleted wits. Do I ...”

“... Eastern countries history has become a joke, this precious beam of light upon a precious detail may be of some help to the next investigator.’ These Selected Letters are not so inveterately rude as I have made them seem, by quoting their author only at his most destructively (and quotably) imperious. Nabokov can be supportive too, and charming, with the ...”

“... that was obliging men to rebuild the entire structure of society on new foundations.’ They may have shared a feeling that aristocratic privilege imposed a duty to provide sound political leadership, and act as intermediaries between the subject and the state, but they interpreted that duty in drastically different ways. Alexis’s intellectual path was ...”

“... image for his poem ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’ – ‘Some burn damp faggots, others may consume/The entire combustible world in one small room’ – from a letter Henry James wrote him in 1915, contrasting the poet, ‘who can be present, and so present, by a simple flicker of your genius’, with the ‘clumsier race’ of novelists who have ...”

“... and although it is no longer so obsessional and so long-lasting as it could once be, it may still determine the individual outlook more than most care to own. The sense of belonging or not belonging, important for Bloomsbury or for the Brideshead Generation written about by Humphrey Carpenter, is less significant than the initial and basic instinct ...”

“... won, making Shakespeare into ‘a true Englishman’ and ‘a sturdy John Bull’, and Bate may well be right in speculating that Wordsworth had at the back of his mind these sorts of class parody – reflecting Henry Crawford’s complacent comment in Mansfield Park – when he deplored the notion of a self-satisfied ‘taste’ for poetry, as if for ...”

“... English generation has done something to defend and broaden that freedom. Lack of this heritage may not be a fault of the Germans, but it is a fact, and one which has more and more evil results in every generation. Therefore German liberals, to achieve anything, would have to fight much harder than we need. The basic issue is whether the German Left were ...”

“... have the Russian tanks rolling out onto the streets as they did in 1953. What they have achieved may well be far more than Gorbachev bargained for. But there is clearly no going back now. The East German people have made it clear that they will not be satisfied until they have gained freedom to travel, freedom of economic choice, and freedom of ...”

“... are needed by the West as the ‘other’, a blank slate to be inscribed, in order that we may construct what we ourselves are. The second half of the book concerns feminist studies in primatology. It is a series of essays about women primatologists’ attempts to counteract the masculinist presentation of apes grouped round dominant males, in ...”

“... Warner, and of their free-thinking patrons, Sir Walter Ralegh and the Earl of North-umberland. He may have known Dr Dee as well. Dr Faustus belongs to, and comments on, this critical phase of magico-scientific transition. The fall of the magician is also the rise of the scientist, the technologist freed (for better or worse) from the metaphysical trappings of ...”