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“... more striking than the soundtrack. Legend has it that the series was born from a studio memo that read simply ‘MTV cops’, and certainly the episodes often look like music videos, an effect enhanced by guest appearances from Phil Collins, Willie Nelson, Little Richard, Miles Davis and many others. But the ...”

“... was founded on a crime (he deposed, imprisoned and some would say caused the death of his cousin Richard II, who had once been his playmate). Caught between self-command and the most crushing self-doubt, Walter knew how to rise to this part and bring it down in the same breath. The king is wan with care and insomnia – he is guilty. He is also ...”

“... raising of the standard of living and closer relations between member states. I didn’t read much of the treaty that evening; instead I talked at the bar to a detective I first met at the Ladbroke Arms last summer. The man from Stettin introduced me to him in the days leading up to the Notting Hill Carnival, when he seemed harried by the police ...”

“... by a new partner, a new city: ‘I was a slum goddess and in college. He looked something like Richard Burton; I resembled Liz. It was, in feeling, as crummy and tortured as that.’ Weird Fucks is a youthful book – people drift in and out of one another’s lives and beds, they live in bars and cafés, they move countries easily, packing up their ...”

“... brother James had been on Captain Cook’s second voyage). There is Joshua Reynolds and Richard Sheridan, and later Madame de Staël and Talleyrand. In her ostensibly private records of her life, Burney often keeps pace with current events and personalities, providing the biographer with the background as well as the foreground of a Life. It is as ...”

“... does not even realise it rhymes.I picked up Simon Critchley’s On Mysticism because I wanted to read it. A survey of historical mystics, examined through the lenses of writers such as Anne Carson and Annie Dillard and T.S. Eliot? Sketches of Dionysius, Bernard of Clairvaux, Christina of Markyate, Christina the Astonishing, Hadewijch of Antwerp, Mechthild of ...”

“... he gets rave reviews from all sorts of famous people. The president of the Federal Republic, Richard von Weizsäcker, sends Stern a note to tell him that he had read one of his lectures ‘with liveliest interest and gratitude’; McGeorge Bundy says that he thought another piece ‘uncommonly good’ and Lionel ...”

“... queen than her grandfather Henry VII; Shakespeare’s first tetralogy moves from Henry VI through Richard III to the arrival of Henry Tudor, who would become Henry VII of England. These plays staged and applauded, Shakespeare turned to a prequel sequence, from Richard II through Henry IV to Henry V. From this a curious ...”

“... forms, it’s likely that by the end of the 16th century only a handful of schoolchildren could read more than a few lines of Homer in the original. Those who fancied themselves as scholars could cite the odd tag from the Iliad and the Odyssey (Odysseus’s assertion ‘let there be one king’ was a favourite), but even literate people would have had only ...”

“... to be sceptical, although, in his brief and sensible treatise on English prose style, Herbert Read very pertinently enquired if anyone had actually seen those ‘tongues’. They were lying tongues no doubt, however dumb. But Kipling knew how eloquent they would be, and brazenly classed them with the good journalist’s passion for fact, for ‘the ...”

“... sometimes confess themselves bewildered or repelled by the inclusion of jokes in papers read to learned societies. The 17th century, however, presents the problem in an especially acute form, which becomes most intractable precisely at the point at which we find ourselves no longer able to say: ‘This is clearly satire.’ The learned style of high ...”

“... Anyone who has ever settled down to read The Holy Bible in Pitman’s Shorthand, or even Three Men in a Boat in the same form, will have a mild idea of the task which faced the Cambridge graduate John Smith (a sizar, married with one child) when in 1819 he was hired to decipher the six volumes of Samuel Pepys’s diary on which Magdalene College had sat for over a century ...”

“... public role of their menfolk, women from precisely these social backgrounds were being urged to read about the public past of the nations in which they lived. Moreover – and as in Austen’s case – a minority of women were beginning to write history, not women’s history, but something which, in the circumstances, was far more challenging. Mercy Otis ...”

“... I read star biographies to find out how stars see themselves and how they see each other. Though I am interested in their behaviour, I am more interested in the curves and austerities of their cognition. Huge gulfs divide a star in daily life from a star on screen; the style in which a star executes an action (film role, household chore, errand, ambassadorial mission) is not the style in which she secretly contemplates her colleagues ...”

“... show how durable that change has been, he could have pointed to today’s exemplars of this ideal: Richard Layard’s Wellbeing Programme at the LSE, for instance, which makes the case for measuring national happiness alongside calculations of GDP.National happiness, of course, is a difficult thing to recognise, let alone measure, and it isn’t always clear ...”