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“... madman sent to Colney Hatch asylum (founded in 1851). Some of Foucault’s errors go uncorrected: Richard III still sits on the throne of England in 1342. Famously, the translation of a sentence describing the life of the mad in the Middle Ages – ‘les fous alors avaient une existence facilement errante’ – as ‘madmen then led an easy wandering ...”

“... had a particularly intimate relationship with power. But one of the fascinating paradoxes of Richard Aldous’s biography is how slight Schlesinger’s influence in Washington actually was, despite his own pride in it, when compared to his influence on the American reading public, which he counted for nothing. In his later years, Schlesinger was best ...”

“... in other European countries suggests no great distinctiveness is involved), there is no way to ‘read off’ political or other convictions from this feature of family background. A familiar form of lazy sociologism lurks beneath all amateur attempts to use class stereotypes to account for individual intellectual convictions. In any case, large numbers of ...”

“... every day since I began writing these pieces I get a letter or an email from someone who has read or remembered and liked my work; they talk about the recent pieces about my cancer or my memories of my teenage years and my relationship with Doris Lessing, my older books, fiction and non-fiction, something they’ve ...”

“... In the evenings, after dinner in hall, groups would take shape informally in the quad. There was Richard Cobb’s lot, making for the buttery and another round of worldly banter. There was this or that sodality, taking a cigarette break or killing time before revision. There was my own cohort, usually divided between the opposing tasks of selling the ...”

“... Cambridge for stealing library books; her stepmother was violent and tyrannical; her half-brother Richard was shipped off to India for some unnamed crime; her brother-in-law Molesworth Phillips was a bullying and unfaithful husband; her elder brother James had an incestuous relationship with his half-sister. It sounds like a Mrs Radcliffe family in a castle ...”

“... squad. Like many US authors, Beschloss assumes that his readers have a week of free time to read a book, which must account for the large numbers of partially read volumes on American shelves. But while the book is very long, over seven hundred pages before the notes start, the subject merits exhaustive treatment and ...”

“... Goering had created to co-opt potential opponents. In November, he was made vice-president (to Richard Strauss’s president) of the newly created Reichsmusikkammer (Goebbels’s baby), to which henceforth all musicians wishing to work professionally had to belong. In January 1934, he signed a contract as director of the Berlin State Opera. But by the end ...”

“... have been perfectly obvious to any English person during the centuries for which the work has been read. In any case, the present exhaustive survey by Peter Field has surely put paid to the Matthew thesis, the Kittredge denial and the Lewis exculpation all together: it is no longer possible to say, in chorus or separately, ‘it wasn’t him, it never ...”

“... of easy, unconventional correctness, the quality she recognised admiringly as ‘breeding’. ‘I read The Winter’s Tale and wept for joy. Breed coming out in Perdita the moment she’s threatened.’ Or, nearer home: ‘Janet ... came in the morning, having done some shopping for us in D[orchester] – looking, in an old weatherproof jacket, a ...”

“... father had seven donkeys and a camel and many goats. Therefore we were rich, yet I could not read, nor could my parents.’ The finale of his show is a slide which shows ‘tribespeople dancing, made happy by literacy’. Then there is the hotel – in this case it is the Cyrus – with a ‘Western-style bar where people hung out like expatriates in a ...”

“... This book is a cry of pure pain, immensely difficult to read without groaning and sometimes weeping and getting up to pace the floor. Its flavour is aptly illustrated by the shocking jacket photograph of Nijinsky undergoing a catatonic seizure at the age of 37, about eight years after he wrote this text. With his necktie neatly knotted, his face shaven and his hair combed, hands curled up, the greatest dancer of his epoch – some say of any epoch – stares into the lens with a horrifying sacrificial patience ...”

“... potential relevance to society. In an astonishingly short-time, scientists have learned to read the billions-long sequences of molecules that comprise DNA, have described in great detail its basic functioning, and have discerned connections between defects in the DNA and disease. Radical transformations of the practices of medicine and law ...”

“... the sale of arms to Iraq. These characters have no redeeming features, and it’s a pleasure to read about them. ‘He would take full advantage of his freedom from party loyalties,’ we read of the politician, ‘by slavishly toeing the line of whichever cynical new shift in policy the present administration happened to ...”

“... who had played a small part in the early skirmishes between Ancients and Moderns in his attacks on Richard Bentley in the 1700s (he described Bentley as ‘a man of fair diligence in turning the pages of dictionaries’), was always going to be watching his feet. In the early decades of the 18th century Neo-Latin poets tried to sound as Latin and as un-Neo as ...”