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“... to see that the archaising revival of Greek culture in the second century AD had some things to be said for it: the writers of the Second Sophistic are lively compared with the Byzantine imitators of the Classics. Toynbee has some interesting things to say about the Byzantine period, remarking on what the Byzantines called their oikonomia, their ability to ...”

“... the ideal of the pure ‘Yale Box’, and in that measure they get kid-glove treatment too. Thus Edward Durell Stone, designer of the pretty little Huntington Hartford Museum and the lacery-tracery US Embassy for New Delhi, is excused exactly the kind of sneering heaped on Wolfe’s villains. With unbelievable innocence (or dissimulation?), he attributes the ...”

“... is to Lord Longford, whom she presses into drying the dinner dishes: ‘Frank looked pale ... He said he would note it in his diary.’ She is convivial and an eager recorder of conversations. Talk she considers ‘frivolous’ can be redeemed by the production of a new fact. When the Boothbys come to dinner they discuss Baldwin and his lover Mrs ...”

“... of letter-writers: as well as extraordinary correspondents like Alexander von Humboldt, who is said to have written more than fifty thousand letters in his long life, millions of ordinary individuals could now send one another messages easily and economically. The British postal service delivered 564 million letters in 1860 and 2.3 billion in 1900. And ...”

“... wont to wear every day’. The wording suggests that the clerk stayed close to what Bayly actually said, showing a respect for her precise wishes. Joan Kent, who had outlived three husbands when she made her will in 1487, gave her son John his father’s silver girdle and a gilt cup that had belonged to his godmother. She warned him to be ‘therewith ...”

“... what is the organisation of these animals, we can scarcely conjecture.’ Much the same could be said today, 140 years on from the voyage of the Nautilus, with less than 5 per cent of the world’s 320 million cubic miles of ocean having so far been explored, and an estimated 50 million unknown species thriving in its depths. Like space exploration, a branch ...”

“... of the land and not otherwise’ – a proposition which had enraged Charles’s father when Sir Edward Coke, one of his chief justices, had advanced it early in the century. It concluded with the impeachment of Charles ‘as a tyrant, traitor, murderer and a public and implacable enemy to the Commonwealth of England’. Westminster Hall was cleared of its ...”

“... pictured on the jacket of this book, on which the photograph powerfully, inevitably, alludes to Edward Hopper. Whatever is going to happen around here is likely to be depressing: possibly just a marital argument, more seriously a fire in a neighbour’s house or the death of a child. Such happiness as can be expected must be looked for on fishing trips, and ...”

“... warned ‘Mature Readers Only!!’ I felt less guilty: the words were a flashing neon sign that said ‘read me.’ Whatever fantasy you can’t act out in real life can be fulfilled in fan fiction. May-December relationships are very popular, as are boys transforming into girls. BDSM has a huge following. But the most common sexual ‘perversion’ is gay ...”

“... regarded the battle as a psychological turning point in Scotland’s history. Flodden, it’s said, undermined the confidence of the country’s rulers and governing classes in the ability of their small realm to play a role in Europe, most obviously as a counterweight to England. James IV is seen as having been forced into invasion and battle by the ...”

“... we insist on its ‘proper disposal’. Hohn’s ideas are more or less in tune with those of Edward Abbey: in his 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, a Vietnam vet called Hayduke wages guerrilla war on landscape-blighting public works projects but defiantly drops litter along the highways he hates. A few decades later it’s the polluter-sponsored ...”

“... where ‘jaded vitality and taxed nerves’ were soothed away by pure air, and (as a song said) hearts were lighter and eyes were brighter. For a decade and a half the image of Metroland was vigorously promoted, but in 1933 the Metropolitan Railway – which in 1863 had been the world’s first underground railway, linking Paddington and Farringdon ...”

“... distance standing in for Thomas’s own incapacity to relate to those who needed him: Father, I said, domesticating an enigma, and as though to humour me you came. But there are precipices Within you. (‘The Echoes Return Slow’) The current archbishop of Canterbury has politely referred to this as a Kierkegaardian theology of ‘post-ethical divine ...”

“... was in the gift of the strongly socialist Countess of Warwick (who also doubled for a time as King Edward VII’s mistress), had been supplied with a revolutionary socialist priest, Conrad Noel. In the course of time Needham modulated from Anglicanism, which he knew to be a local phenomenon (‘because I happened to be born in the European West in 1900, and ...”

“... sources corroborate Procopius’ account: even Theodora’s fellow Miaphysite John of Ephesus said that she came ‘from the brothel’ (porneion), and Potter’s argument that the word could have referred simply to her past as an actress is too generous. There are other things Procopius could not possibly have known, and some he simply made up, though he ...”