“... 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 ...”

“... Consider, before we turn to the main business, a sketch of his explanation of why a ‘meme’ (read ‘idea’ in English-language editions) can become widely accepted in a culture: It’s because the meme is beneficial. And to whom does the benefit accrue? Why, to the meme. ‘In the domain of memes, the ultimate beneficiary . . . is: the meme ...”

“... literary memory and even into living memory. But actually contemporary? It would be interesting to read an Ofsted report on a medieval school. For one thing, education in post-Roman times was essentially concerned with literacy and with Christianity, and at first very closely linked with monasticism. The aims of a monastic teacher dealing with a seven-year-old ...”

“... world art’, but writing that tells you more than you can see for yourself and makes you want to read on is harder to come by. That is what Bell provides, with clarity and a wonderfully sustained faculty of response. A practical device he uses to carry you through is the long caption. He accepts that some readers will skim and dip; captions can offer a ...”

“... that relationships frequently traversed ethnic or linguistic divides. At Turnastone, a man called Richard Gogh was said to be consorting with various women: Helen, daughter of Trahaearn, and Lleucu, daughter of Einion, and Lleucu Kedy – all probably Welsh – but also with the more English-sounding Margaret Hunt. Another woman in the village, accused of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... been in love with her; she left him for Koestler, which my half-brother never got over. We used to read books together in the mornings. But then Mamaine died – of asthma, and of being depressed by Arthur Koestler – which was very upsetting. I’m not being very coherent about all this, but it was all part of the atmosphere. AH: Where was the ...”

“... the moralist that prevents us from evolving a personal, more complex and subtle morality. When Richard III says, ‘O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me!’ a radical alternative is being proposed: that conscience makes cowards of us all because it is itself cowardly. We believe in, we identify with, this starkly condemnatory and punitively ...”

“... not have much success, therefore, among even academic lawyers here. His book was probably not much read by Argentine politicians, who had always had their own sources, or by ‘men of vision’, who were looking in some other direction. It was read by the Foreign Office, which had begun to have doubts about our case in 1910 ...”

“... anachronistic, antiqued model of “good literature”’; he quoted the naturalist Richard Mabey, who, like Fisher, had known and loved that coast for years. To read Sebald, according to Mabey, was to watch the belittlement of ‘a very close friend’.Fisher’s first book, Capitalist Realism: Is There No ...”

“... as either too good or too bad to need defending; it’s guaranteed that anyone willing to read a volume on King Crimson, say, or Crosby, Stills and Nash, is already on board. Then there is the curse of Dylanology, such a blight on pop criticism: worship of lyrics as ‘poetry’, modelled on pop’s least representative major figure. This sort of ...”

“... the low-key counterintelligence operation would mask the improvements in the US’s capacity to read sensitive Soviet communications. ‘Nobody on the Joint Chiefs of Staff ever believed we were going to build Star Wars,’ the officer said, ‘but if we could convince the Russians that we could survive a first strike, we win the game.’ The aim of the ...”

“... name and was meant to consign the sectarian convulsions of the decade to the past. In 1659, under Richard Cromwell, Marvell obtained his parliamentary seat as a court nominee sent from Whitehall to defeat a powerful republican candidate. When the Parliament met he savoured the defeat of the republicans and of their ‘maxim’ that ‘all power is in the ...”

“... countless pathways for others to explore.’ I came late to Painting in Britain; when I eventually read it many of those pathways had begun to be explored and I didn’t recognise Waterhouse’s book as the pathbreaking achievement others knew it to be. Looking at the marginal marks in my copy, I see that I too quickly decided it was one of those genteel ...”

“... the philosophy of their time. But they differ in scope and emphasis, so it is well worthwhile to read them both. Benjamin Lipscomb is American; Clare Mac Cumhaill is Irish and Rachael Wiseman is British. His book covers a longer time span, and goes more deeply into the philosophical controversies in which the four were engaged, particularly the ...”