“... language as such for its continuance. The idea of the language as something already recovered was more attractive than the immense labour of actually recovering it. The tendency to idolise as a national aspiration the recovery of something which successive government policies have managed to exterminate almost completely is peculiarly damaging both in itself ...”

“... counter-revolution, and instead approached liberal modernity by a detour, progressing quietly and more efficiently under the aegis of its otherwise irrational traditions and precedents. Variants of this national myth exert a grip far beyond the ranks of Eurosceptics: even among professional historians, the expression ‘English Enlightenment’ still offends ...”

“... of about two hundred and fifty words, though again there are days which take five or six times more than this to deal with. Was it all worth it? Though anxious not to give Mrs Castle the slightest encouragement to publish the diaries she is no doubt keeping as a Member of the European Parliament, I have to say that it was. For a total of some eight out of ...”

“... directed by techniques of quantification. The present title might lead one to expect essays more specifically on the ways in which historians think and operate, but in fact they all deal with historical, not with methodological topics. If we are to understand the mind and method of this historian, we need to extract them from what he has ...”

“... Cummins gives no information on his schooling. Camden, however, says: This Drake (to relate no more than what I have heart from himself) was born of mean Parentage in Devonshire, and had Francis Russel (afterwards Earl of Bedford) for his Godfather, who, according to Custome, gave him his christen name. Whilest he was yet a Child, his Father, imbracing the ...”

“... and I scribble each morning almost as if demented by years of fictional starvation. I feel like Thomas Mann when he spoke of the ‘passionate truancy’ of his political speeches and writings in opposition to Hitler: a truancy which aided rather than subtracted from his creative work. After eight years in rural Suffolk I was fed up with life as a ...”

“... ghostly self? At Elizabeth Jane Howard’s, the voice of the dearly departed couldn’t have been more distinctive. (By the way, is the departed a victim, as in a victim of death, or merely a passive recipient? Not to sound like an ad for Center Parcs, but does one suffer death, or is it just life’s ultimate experience?) Howard’s memorial was held at the ...”

“... the gauche Uncle Tannous (a diminutive of Antonius/Anthony) on a weekly sitcom called The Danny Thomas Show. Danny Thomas was the son of Maronite Christian immigrants from Kahlil Gibran’s village, Becharre, in north Lebanon. His assimilation was so thorough that he took the Al Jolson role of cantor’s son in a 1952 ...”

“... by that of their husband. It is hard to know whether the first or second Mrs Hardy had the more doleful time. Emma is more mysterious. Already 33 when she married Hardy in 1874, she was a mature woman with decided opinions and a strong sense of self-esteem committing herself to a shy but ambitious ...”

“... preoccupation with the traditionally masculine concerns of national politics. They will await the more eagerly his forthcoming study of Lucy Hutchinson, who, not content with protecting her regicide husband from the scaffold, wrote her own Creation epic. The case for the republican conscience resounds most eloquently in the impressive coda to this book, in ...”

“... aristocrats in stately halls. His last public appearance is in January 1928 as a pall-bearer at Thomas Hardy’s funeral in Westminster Abbey along with the Prime Minister, Kipling, Shaw, Housman, Barrie, Galsworthy, and the Masters of the Queen’s College, Oxford and Magdalene College, Cambridge – all of whom (with the exception of the dons) I recall as ...”

“... our being here. So the universe has ‘woken up’, but in a local, accidental and low-key sense. Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos rejects this view and tries to build another. His subtitle is ‘Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False’. It is false, Nagel says, because it cannot deal with a cluster of real ...”

“... Deleuze and Guattari) has become an appealing metaphor for all sorts of freedom, while the more negative refugeedom described in the work of Giorgio Agamben has been taken to define the condition of all of us in a world in which place-based civic and legal securities are increasingly being eroded by a volatile global economy. But if everyone is an ...”

“... Byron and his friend and collaborator Joseph Drake was the American Keats. Together, somewhat more compromisingly, Halleck and Drake were referred to as the Damon and Pythias of American poets. As one would expect of a man so highly honoured, Halleck could count major cultural figures among his friends – Mozart’s librettist Da Ponte and James Fenimore ...”

“... of our fellow citizens are falling farther and farther behind.’ Who said this? Jeremy Corbyn? Thomas Piketty? In fact it was Nick Hanauer, an American entrepreneur and multibillionaire, who in a TED talk in 2014 confessed to living a life that the rest of us ‘can’t even imagine’. Hanauer doesn’t believe he’s particularly talented or unusually ...”