“... fortunes of evolutionary theory in the 1830s and 1840s, his densely-detailed narrative can also be read as a series of interrelated biographies – lives lived against a complex political and institutional background. Desmond’s argument is persuasive, and it can easily be extended, as he points out, in several directions. For example, in addition to offering ...”

“... developed by Orton and Stoppard, cultural despair variously expressed – for instance, by Herbert Read and Kingsley Amis; and then to the sorts of things about which Appleyard enjoys talking, such as Brutalism and Pop Art. He does not neglect Russell, Ayer, Popper etc; he neglects very little. Indeed the quantity of material he doesn’t neglect is ...”

“... the ceremony would be ‘inconvenient’. Senna, a young Brazilian woman told the Independent’s Richard Williams, ‘was our hero. Our only one.’ Senna’s triumph, like Pele’s before him, was to have beaten the North at one of its own games. And the North, angry Brazilians wanted to believe, had killed him. A million or so of Sao Paulo’s 15 million ...”

“... the advent of sustained war in and from the air. Edith Sitwell’s ‘Still falls the rain’ and Richard Eberhart’s ‘The Fury of Aerial Bombardment’ overreach themselves in their attempts to find a rhetorical lift to match the fall of bombs. Keith Douglas was the best of the English Second World War poets because he managed to reconstitute traditional ...”

“... got stuck in the allegedly golden years of good King Clem. Michael Foot – though, together with Richard Crossman, he was wrongly excluded from the Attlee Government – is one such. In consequence, Foot the politician is not fully integrated with Foot the man. Whereas the rest of Foot is clever, subtle, charming, broad-minded and living in the present, Foot ...”

“... tiresome 94-page preface to attacking writers such as Habermas, Ricoeur and George Klein, who read Freud as having begun a rigorous but not scientific approach to the mind. ‘Scientific’ has to bear a fairly complicated burden here. The emphasis in some of these writers is on the absence of anything like a relation of objective causality in their ...”

“... tournaments and the unromantic motives behind William’s quest for a rich wife. (Those who have read his article on ‘Youth in Aristocratic Society’, The Chivalrous Society, 1977, will find this part of the new book familiar.) One wonders whether Duby is right to insist that the life of knights was so different from that of the church clerks whom they ...”

“... until they quarrelled (which Strindberg did sooner or later with most of his friends), the poet Richard Dehmel, the magazine editor Julius Meier-Graefe and Knut Hamsun, but not Sibelius – he couldn’t stand the noise. Wherever he lived, Strindberg needed such ‘clubs’, as well as a garden where he could grow things. He was also beginning to have ...”

“... Both Dracula and Frankenstein owed their immediate afterlife to unfortunate theatre adaptations. Richard Brinsley Peake’s Presumption: or, The Fate of Frankenstein (1823) turned Mary Shelley’s book into a moralistic tale of hubris, as well as making the creature mute and introducing Victor Frankenstein’s pantomimic assistant (here called Fritz). The ...”

“... 1959. ‘It will make far more interesting reading than The Quest for Corvo.’ In the late 1970s, Richard Cobb took the view that Peters merited ‘further study, perhaps even a short biography, as he is fairly outstanding both as an academic fraud and as a bigamist’. To complain that the account we have at last been given is somewhat unrelenting, that the ...”

“... guarantors of national prosperity. A ragged girl in a Midlands nail factory was interviewed by Richard Henry Horne. She did not, he reported, ‘know what a country dance is, was never at a dance in her life; never saw a dance; never heard of Harlequin and Columbine; has no idea what they are like.’ Horne, peculiarly, is recalling pantomime conventions ...”

“... justice of the peace, or the mayor of this city? By what authority do you ask me these things?’ Richard (‘Beau’) Nash was at a loss for a ready reply. The ‘King of Bath’, as he liked to be known, was the gamester son of a Swansea bottlemaker, a heavyweight playboy whose abundant assurance, or chutzpah, had qualified him to act as arbiter of elegance ...”

“... an essay in vindication and vengeance interspersed with titbits of political gossip, and I did not read it at the time; it was only at the start of the research for Yes, Minister that I discovered how much sharp observation and serious analysis it contained. It was left to Douglas Hurd, her successor at No 10 when Heath moved in, to pay tribute to its ...”

“... years of Field Marshal Lord Wavell, The Chief, is no exception. It would, indeed, be possible to read the book without ever being properly aware that the subject’s decisions involved the killing, maiming or imprisonment of thousands of men. But Mr Lewin’s book also suffers from a more pernicious shortcoming of the genre: the assumption that all ...”

“... our ideas of the sexual. We do not just go to bed, Heath explains, with meretricious manuals: we read novels too. And there is a connection between the genres, not just a superficial connection, in novels where we are told how to do it in stories of other people doing it, but a connection in the idea of ‘the novelistic’ itself. The novelistic is the ...”