“... with enthusiasm for Comte’s ideas, and the same was true in much of late 19th-century Europe and North America. That enthusiasm often waned as Comte’s doctrines were more fully understood (most famously in the case of John Stuart Mill, whose early admiration for Comte’s phenomenalism and rationality gradually gave way ...”

“... his current Ophelia and cast Terry in her place. From then on, in Britain and increasingly in North America, Henry Irving and Ellen Terry became the undisputed first couple of the British stage. After Irving’s star waned, and even more after his death in 1905, Terry extended her range, not least into the work of her correspondent Bernard Shaw. She ...”

“... Napoleonic Wars, a patriotic mythology fixated on the achievements of Nelson, Wellington and Sir John Moore at Corunna tends to filter out fear and uncertainty in favour of a seemingly inevitable procession of victories. As Jenny Uglow stresses in her gripping account of Britain during the Napoleonic era, contemporaries had no such feeling of security. There ...”

“... rate among medical students – who were liable to let the knife slip – was high: the surgeon John Abernethy concluded his lectures with a resigned ‘God help you all.’ When John Phillips Potter nicked his knuckle anatomising – at the dead man’s request – the circus performer the ‘Gnome Fly’, he swiftly ...”

“... a cosmopolitan literary culture shaped by the Roman Empire and the Western Church, one that joined North Africa, Asia Minor and Europe in networks of travel and intellectual exchange.Watt’s study focuses on religious women and the monasteries that enabled and preserved their work. These institutions gave early medieval women access to formal education and to ...”

“... port, Chilean wine and so forth. One of the number could never get enough of the joke. This was John Braine, whose special party-trick was the skipping of ironic bits. When he said that England these days was run by the trade unions and the pansies, he meant it. When he went on about treason and the intellectuals there was grim, literal relish in his ...”

“... almost unseated Labour in one of its safest seats. By-election victories soon followed at Croydon North-West, Crosby and Glasgow, Hillhead. Overflowing public meetings were worthy of Gladstone’s Midlothian campaign. Although the Falklands War brought this period of euphoria to a close, morale in the Alliance remained high. It was against such inflated ...”

“... to know. He is often very funny. There are hilarious set-pieces at the expense of, for example, John Braine and Paul Johnson. For the Sake of Argument is not an easy book to précis. There are eight parts and 72 essays, the allocation of which is somewhat random. Most of the pieces in ‘Rogues’ Gallery’, for instance, could go equally well into ...”

“... home was ‘the rendezvous of all good and honest spirits ... it seemed a kind of university.’ John Selden and the historian John Speed acknowledged their profound debts to him. Among many literary acquaintances, Ben Jonson was a close friend over a long period. Like Cotton, Jonson was a pupil at Westminster of the great ...”

“... best we have’. He has called Emma Donoghue ‘one of the great literary ventriloquists’ and John Boyne ‘one of the great craftsmen in contemporary literature’. Gerard Donovan reminds him of ‘other great writers, not least Knut Hamsun, Franz Kafka and … Bernhard Schlink’. McCann is the high priest of high praise, always handy with a ...”

“... homogenised into a collective “they”.’ This process goes on, even without the assistance of North American academics, under the more familiar name of ‘stereotyping’. But the use of the term ‘othering’ adds the rich implication that the more ‘knowable’ (that is, the more stereotyped) the object becomes, the more inscrutable ...”

“... huge as they tugged it clear, but suddenly tiny – a slow dispersing feather of smoke spiraling north. In Natural Causes the chief pleasure – and it is considerable – is that of beholding complex thought and diction effortlessly adapted to stanzaic forms. Motion takes big breaths. Here are the closing lines of ‘You do, I ...”

“... in the world was ours, but not as a burden or an inheritance, and not in the solemn way in which North American educators claim the Western canon as the track of their own mental history. Borges compares Argentinian writers to the Jews in relation to Western culture, the Irish in relation to English culture: ‘I believe that Argentinians, South Americans in ...”

“... or Frankly. If anything of Hemingway survives into this phase of Ford’s writing it is what John Cheever (himself an influence) claimed you could sniff in all of Hemingway’s work: the smell of loneliness. Ford had always been a writer with a message, in the sense that there was always a mood, a resolution, his fiction was drawn towards; he wanted to ...”

“... in order to save money. A strange coalition came to its rescue: the horticultural entrepreneurs John Loudon and George Glenny; the Dukes of Bedford and Devonshire; Radical politicians, including Joseph Hume; and Sir William Hooker and John Lindley, the foremost botanists of the age. They won in 1840, when Kew passed from ...”