“... marginal. But if the test of any major work is also the questions it prompts, a few loose thoughts may be worth bouncing off these superbly polished surfaces. The axis around which the trilogy organises the history of the ‘long 19th century’ – running, as it were, from 1776 or 1789 to 1914 – is, in Hobsbawm’s words, ‘the triumph and transformation ...”

“... court. In 1608, at the age of 32, he set out on the European journey which made his name. (It may have been the death of his father in the previous year that made this financially possible.) There was an element of the publicity stunt about it. Will Kemp, the comic, had morris-danced from London to Norwich in 1599 and published a book about it, Kemps Nine ...”

“... his earlier book, Before the Armada (1966). He makes no bones about having written it as ‘it may have appeared’ to the English government at the time ‘rather than from some stratospheric international point of view’. Even so, he cannot resist, as most of us cannot resist, some later parallels in this struggle of a small state, comparatively weak in ...”

“... detachment is not an attitude or stance that Delacroix – however much in theory or manners he may have pretended to it – ever came close to. Proximity and entanglement are his subjects.The loss of the top three feet of Lion Hunt is obviously a sadness. But the fragment we have remains a marvel, and its packed, airless, claustrophobic quality only ...”

“... legality has been respected throughout the Southern Cone, and in that sense Cardoso’s rule may seem nothing special. But substantively, the quality of Brazilian democracy – so the reply goes – has vastly improved during his Presidency. Compared with the chaotic, turbulent years under Sarney, Collor and Itamar, his Government has been a model of ...”

“... on ‘The Victorian Values of Dr Tripe’, you’d better carry a chequebook. Shoreditch Town Hall may well be the last place where such an anachronistic object serves any useful purpose, in these days of obligatory standing orders, cashback supermarkets with low-level barter and traded promissory notes for those outside the credit system. What goes on ...”

“... field notes and documents, and his papers weren’t in order. But once he arrived in New York, in May 1941, he was enraptured by the city’s ‘horizontal and vertical disorder’, describing its fabric as ‘riddled with holes’: ‘All you had to do was pick one and slip through it if, like Alice, you wanted to get to the other side of the looking ...”

“... The Mesopotamian, Greek and Roman conviction that we are mere shades in the underworld may seem a bit pessimistic, Casey writes, but at least the ancients didn’t spend all their time fearing hellfire: They did not in general fear an eternity squashed into a stinking sewer of rotten guts, burning in a huge mound of bodies, overcome by an ...”

“... reputation and pride were the main issue at stake in these lawsuits. And then, just like that, in May 1912, Wilbur died of typhoid. He was 45. He’d had a close call from the disease before, in his twenties, but this time the illness took its course in a few weeks. His father wrote: ‘A short life, full of consequences. An unfailing intellect, imperturbable ...”

“... so unreliable or delicious as one’s rackety memories of oneself. Some of my recollections may be tainted by time or others’ slanted tellings or photographs, and my memories are no more and no less likely to be precisely accurate than yours or hers. I’m saying only that I was there, or was told first hand, and have remembered things thus and ...”

“... into what can feel like a bottomless pit. Bunyan, like Milton and Blake, is one of the guides we may summon when we find ourselves taking that plunge. Perhaps it is unfair to expect a critic to identify with Bunyan’s dream of truth, but Michael Davies’s lengthy study is remarkable for its failure to empathise with Bunyan’s heroic political ...”

“... fiction as if they are in fact fictional, whatever the degree to which their fictional experiences may resemble experiences in the author’s life. Characters in fiction are primarily shaped to serve the expressive needs and imaginative designs of the work in which they appear. This shouldn’t need even to be said. Atlas’s critical naivety and the ...”

“... pilot, Lieutenant Van Dyke Fernald, who was shot down at Godega, near Conegliano, in July 1918. He may have accidentally broken formation – often a fatal mistake – but his fellow officers believed he had hung back deliberately at the end of a patrol in order to engage the enemy. His plane was either hit by anti-aircraft fire or attacked in the air – a ...”

“... down with Ina rules, Ina lore, Ina feuds and an exceedingly long and boring Ina court case. And it may be nice, if that’s what you’re into, to read about freely consenting adults enjoying sex with superhumans; it’s less so when participants have, in effect, been drugged. Or when Shori, who’s 53, we’re told, in Ina years, looks like she’s about ...”

“... realism; though with both countries still producing permafrosted academic painting. It may now be clear that it was the French who were to make the future of art; but at the time there was lively curiosity and interchange between Paris and London. Charles Deschamps, who sold Henry Hill his pictures, was a patron and friend of Rossetti, Ford Madox ...”