“... Revolution to the Civil War era, the picture became decidedly blurred, and Whiggery seemed to peter out. What was the connection between the two major upheavals of England’s so-called ‘century of revolutions’? How far was the Glorious Revolution of 1688 a consolidation of the gains of the chaotic English Revolution of the 1640s? The history of the ...”

“... were both written by scholars based in Europe. Yet in general, on the basis of my own experience, Peter Baldwin – an academic at UCLA who has also done research on transatlantic historical practice – is justified in claiming that ‘American historians are the most cosmopolitan.’* Different levels of economic resources, different pedagogic traditions ...”

“... to Augustus John. Forced into national service for 18 slack months, he spent most of the time reading, Joyce above all, and Ulysses became the subject of a first suite of etchings; old media attracted him as much as new. ‘Hamilton was fascinated by the skill, the virtuosity and the outrageous power of the command of language that gave Joyce the freedom ...”

“... human evil. The unvarnished records of the Auschwitz trials have yielded a work of some stature in Peter Weiss’s The Investigation, and even the sub-genre of the memoirs of Hitler’s dog has achieved ironic elevation in Grass’s Hundejahre. Closer to home, Michael Hamburger has devoted himself to bringing German poetry before us and to maintaining its ...”

“... novel and an extended Bildungsroman, Pontoppidan’s narrative follows the vicissitudes of Peter Andreas (Per) Sidenius. Like the author, Per is born into a clergyman’s family in East Jutland in the 1850s. After defeat to Germany in the war of 1864, a third of Denmark’s territory is annexed, and the boy grows up in a period of national ...”

“... that Gus and Call might reflect conflicting – yet complementary – sides of their author makes reading this quartet of novels more fun, especially when considered alongside Daugherty’s biography. In these new reprints, the novels comprise about 2500 pages. Lined up beside one another they are about as wide as they are tall. Picador seems to want you to ...”

“... aahing, sentimental and nostalgic, with every mention of black Levis worn with Doctor Martens, of Peter Frampton and Art Gartfunkel, of homebrew wine at the parents’ house and fancy wine when you get invited round by old college friends who have done much better for themselves than you have. In an earlier draft of this article, I tried to construct a little ...”

“... in touch with nature, you had to have spent some time away from it, quite possibly in a library, reading about what you had missed. Environmentalism is a reactionary force, and it has in its time contained some appalling reactionaries. The Nazis were keen on wholegrain bread, and against artificial colourings and preservatives in food; the SS controlled 75 ...”

“... you) by insisting on presenting herself as the more interesting of the two. There is no point in reading Dr Cook’s book for insight into the politics and the personalities with whom Robin Cook was involved. She met Gordon Brown just after her marriage, but has ‘little remaining impression of Gordon, whom I have met only once or twice since then, and he ...”

“... that Aeschylus’ rival Phrynichus was particularly noted for his choreographies, or learn from Peter Wilson in Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy that the shawm (aulos) which always accompanied a performance came in various shapes and sizes depending on the musical context (the ‘wedding shawm’, for example, consisted of one ‘male’ and one ...”

“... story of the Enlightenment’s steady diffusion outwards from its Parisian source. In the 1960s, Peter Gay gave them new power in his brilliant extended essay The Enlightenment: An Interpretation. Gay recognised the international dimensions of the Enlightenment, and included Scots, English, Germans and Italians as well as French in what he called the ...”

“... He revels in being the little man held back by the big bully, though you come to suspect after reading Bower’s book that little bullies are just as obnoxious. He decides to market Virgin Cola, and complains that Coca-Cola is taking unfair advantage of being the market leader, by, as it were, being the market leader. Actually, he seems to complain about ...”

“... was supposedly William Maginn, who retaliated for Bulwer-Lytton’s caricature of him as Peter MacGrawler in Paul Clifford by using his position as editor of Fraser’s Magazine to publish a series of wounding articles about Bulwer-Lytton’s novels. ‘Illustrious Vidocq’, as Bulwer-Lytton called him, was the inspiration for the ambivalent ...”

“... Oxford, then drifted into the Oscar Wilde circle. He received a presentation copy of The Ballad of Reading Gaol from Wilde and spent six days with him in exile, before taking a calculated decision to drop him. At 21 he inherited money and after a spell at the Slade lived the life of an aesthete-dilettante: ‘with a friend he brought the young Jacob Epstein ...”

“... I Ching seems unlike the man I knew. Lambert reveals that at Oxford he himself had a fling with Peter Brook whom I had thought a model of heterosexuality but who seduced Lambert via a silk dressing-gown and Chopin nocturnes on the gramophone. It’s something to be remembered nowadays when the sage of dthe modern theatre is taking himself too seriously ...”