“... And it is over now and nobody’s fault.’ Her suicide a few weeks later horrified him and may have contributed to his own in 1939. In the exhibition, tantalising short pieces of film, including what is thought to be the only footage of Strachey, waving excitedly from a window, evoke something of the vitality of Carrington’s heyday. One shows her on ...”

“... a cultural history of intellectual practices.’ Those who have worked on the subject for decades may welcome this development, but it’s worth thinking about what has been left behind. The big questions don’t go away simply because scholars lose interest. One reason to care about the second and third-tier intellectuals in Knowledge Lost is their ...”

“... psychologies of rescuer and betrayer,’ Wasserstein notes, ‘are not necessarily far apart. Both may be understood as forms of dominance, each affording a measure of gratification and self-justification.’In 1993, Wasserstein and his brother ‘returned to Krakovets’, as it is spelled today. ‘We returned, that is, to a place we had never been ...”

“... give a person pause, but Mike is determined. The skipper is recruited and the drifter – his name may be Liam – signs up to join the crew.They are one man short. That place goes to Nick (George MacKay), as he thinks he’s called, who leaves his beloved wife and young daughter for a couple of days at sea in order to make some much needed cash. As he leaves ...”

“... Gaza’ more than a century later. A Persian garrison was installed in Gaza itself, which may be the source of a small sculpted ceramic head with a pinched nose and round eyes, pointed at top and bottom into a soft Persian cavalry cap and a long beard, its hairs individually inscribed and painted black. Beside it in the same case sits the broken base ...”

“... to diversify their economies and improve their image abroad. But the Acropolis Museum in Athens may be the most useful comparison here. Like the Grand Egyptian Museum, it is designed to overlook an important archaeological site and to focus minds on Greece’s struggle to reclaim its antiquities. Ottoman rule in Athens and beyond isn’t mentioned. The ...”

“... unlike ours. Even if this is possible, it seems to require of Hero mistakes so egregious that it may be hard to tell whether Hero knows what he is thinking. Strawson and Evans conspire to pose one of the great problems of contemporary theory of knowledge with exquisite acuteness: if atomistic empiricism does not suffice to derive the concepts necessary for ...”

“... Symphony’, which is always referred to by commentators as ‘Barnefield’s “When will my May come?” ’ The generally heterosexual implication of the tenor/soprano exchanges in this Part disguises the fact that the Barnfield lines are an extract, starting in midstanza, from ‘The Affectionate Shepherd’, a long Virgilian pastoral that is ...”

“... book’s unchristian, kindly attitude to the heroine’s hope that if she can die just right, she may, in a dormouse, or some other creature’s form, be ...”

“... know, was a snob, to an extent which was positively disabling. It cannot have mattered much – it may even have been an advantage – in the career which, about the time with which this volume opens, he had just thrown up. For diplomatic services are not exactly the antennae of the race, when it comes to social relationships. What more proper, over half a ...”

“... to be sensible and disciplined. But we have determination and it is possible that a situation may arise in which, irrespective of the consequences, we shall have to act against our better judgment. In the name of higher ideals and ...”

“... life; yet the poems themselves have remained spare and short. What ever fits of lust or malice he may have allowed himself in the everyday world, he can justly claim that in his lyrics he has never been unfaithful to his ...”

“... rubbish he and his colleagues were obliged to churn out day by day. Here again, I think, things may well have changed for the better. For most modern Reardons, these rending scenes will instantly evoke images of Chancery Lane – or, more precisely, that small alley off the Lane where generations of book reviewers and literary men have known the confused ...”

“... the creator saw further than the follower of Chatterton. However quaint the ‘slug-horn’ may seem in Chatterton’s ‘Battle of Hastings II’, it has a peculiar rightness in Browning’s poem. As Barry Tuckwell, its foremost living exponent, reminds us in his splendid new book, the horn began its history in utterance and has never shaken off its ...”

“... one of her brothers was the original of Charley’s Aunt. After Wilde’s disgrace and death she may have lost heart a little. But just as she had stood by her ruined friend, so she put a brave face on her marriage until Ernest, on the verge of bankruptcy, was sent away to Canada in the company of his illegitimate daughter, at the diamond merchant’s ...”