“... mere ‘hack’ before he became a poet, as some have suggested (indeed his critical biography of Richard Jefferies, Wilson argues, is ‘a classic of the genre’); nor was he ‘grindingly poor’ (‘his earnings between 1906 and 1912 were about the equivalent of a university professor’s’); but ‘perhaps the most serious distortion of the Thomas ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and idolatrous popery.A preliminary sally in July 1643, when the Parliamentarian commander Colonel Richard Norton had expected ‘much spoil and little opposition’, had ended in failure. It was the first sign that taking Basing House would involve more than strolling through the parkland and bashing down the door, and should have made Waller less sanguine ...”

“... their subjects. I have something in common with Joyce, and with Wilde, is the modest assumption of Richard Ellmann. Max was a bit like me, implies Cecil. That brings them, and us, all the closer to the subject. It can also lead to misunderstanding. Oddly enough, as Cecil’s admirable biography shows, both he and Max understood Oscar Wilde a good deal better ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... sheeps’ guts, a jumble of historical and contemporary costumes, leaden daggers and Hell mouths may seem oddly assorted, Hattaway suggests, but, quaint now, they had a coherence at the time which forbids our condescension. Yet the force of this is somehow lost as the argument is crystallised back into the theory which gave it birth: ‘Costume in fact was a ...”

“... unskilled role with as much speed and efficiency as they could muster. The Front was, as Richard Rhodes put it in The Making of the Atom Bomb, an industrial operation for the manufacture of corpses. Disney and Kroc were great admirers of Ford (as was Lenin) and saw assembly lines as the embodiment of efficiency, order and consistency. These lines ...”

“... book in rejoinder. It is going to be a long time before a better book of its kind appears than Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. The elegance of its style, the easy and effective deployment of historical scholarship, and, above all, the ability to distinguish the central threads of recent debate from the side-issues and to follow ...”

“... a Western consensus developed that the intervention was something best forgotten. Indeed, both Richard Nixon in 1972 and Margaret Thatcher twelve years later succeeded so well in this that they were able to assure Soviet interlocutors that their countries had never been at war with each other.There was plenty of reason to see the intervention as nasty ...”

“... autobiographical papers, Surely you’re joking, Mr Feynman?, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Richard Feynman, describes being piqued by an article in Science about how well bloodhounds can smell. Feynman hates not being best, and so he took time off from inventing the atom bomb (he was working at Los Alamos) to run an experiment. He had his wife handle ...”

“... Office, this is by no means a triumphalist volume in celebration of the Conservative Party. It may indeed be the Left which has most to learn from it. The perspective it adopts is very much that of our own day, starting from the premise that the Tories have been in power for the last 16 years – and that this is broadly in keeping with their performance ...”

“... a household and be a wife which he wrote for her during their engagement. He adored his first son, Richard, a prodigy who (if we believe the diary) could recite the Psalms and read Greek at an age when most children today are thinking about Lego. But Richard died when he was only five, and Evelyn found it hard to transfer ...”

“... features, and what he has said in earlier pages or volumes has to be recapitulated since it may now lie so far back along the trail. Both purposes are served by repeated perorations about LBJ forcing through the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which finally gave all blacks the vote, and about the canniness with which he foresaw Southern resistance in Congress ...”

“... affronted national pride: ‘The English like to think they like to laugh at themselves. This may have been true once when there was no apprehension that the Sun might one day Set. But it is not true today. The good ship Britannia is waterlogged in a shark-infested sea. Don’t rock the boat’. I think now, as I thought then, that this was well over the ...”

“... painters, Velázquez was the only one who, to be fully appreciated, had to be seen in Spain. Richard Ford, in his Handbook for Travellers in Spain, had made the same point two years earlier. He conceded that Murillo was more successful ‘in delineations of female beauty, the ideal, and holy subjects’, but Velázquez’s ‘representation of ...”