“... He had spent most of his London evenings in the British Museum Library working on Greek, and more intensively, Latin authors, notably Propertius, Juvenal and Ovid, and had produced some learned articles much admired by the few who were qualified to comment. Then, at University College, he began work on an edition of a long, dull and difficult ...”

“... by painting, by an obsession with intellectual and mathematical puzzles, and by becoming even more of a workaholic in fields more to his fancy than the law. Like many with unstable personalities, he was obsessed with finding a balance between extremes, and order and moderation were paramount in his ideas about the ...”

“... lines. In a similar way, Victor Hugo remarked of the post-Napoleonic Bourbons that ‘nothing is more decrepit than at the moment of its restoration.’ The editors of this volume might agree with such sentiments. Their book contains knowledgeable and entertaining contributions. Hugh Trevor-Roper discusses the origins of Scottish kitsch; David Cannadine the ...”

“... its doctrines, its institutions and, above all, its grandees – has been going on in the US for more than a decade. Take Samantha Power, US Ambassador to the United Nations, former director of Harvard’s Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy and self-described ‘genocide chick’, who advocated war in Libya and Syria, and argued for new ways to arm-twist US ...”

“... It makes it easier to relish the dramatics of Horace Vernet’s Mazeppa, to see that there is more than nice observation of weather in Paul Huet’s picture of a lonely rider, Storm at the End of the Day.Dumas’s novel mixes operatic themes with the odd sourly realistic vignette. The exhibition shows how two different visual cultures produced what lives ...”

“... and exorcistic rituals. Amongst geologists, the villain-in-chief, endlessly execrated, is the Rev. Thomas Burnet. Leading the heroes home are James Hutton and Sir Charles Lyell. What was Burnet’s sin? He was the Judas who supposedly sold out geology to Scripture. In his Sacred Theory of the Earth – which appeared just before Newton’s Principia – Burnet ...”

“... and the acceptance speeches for literary prizes reproduced in Not a Novel – there are many more in the German version – testify to her unlooked for stardom. In 2015 her novel Go Went Gone, which deals with the refugee crisis, was published at the height of the debate in Germany about asylum seekers arriving from Syria. Die Welt’s review appeared on ...”

“... words. But to transmit all those words, a book as large as the Bible required a very large herd. More than five hundred calves died to create the magnificent Codex Amiatinus, the oldest complete Latin Bible, which dates from the time of Bede. The Middle English charters allude to a much longer tradition. In an Old English riddle-poem it is the dead animal ...”

“... Reading the English translations of the Psalms – reading Tyndale, Coverdale, Milton, Sidney, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Francis Bacon, Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw and the inspired committee-work of the Authorised Version – one immediately notices that the biblical texts are really quite vile, and that the poets’ ‘personal agendas’ seem almost without ...”

“... disrupted; but he also believed that new equilibria would establish themselves in due course. Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population (first published in 1798) had argued that human populations carry on growing until their needs exceed the supply of sustenance; and when Darwin read it in 1838 he extended the principle to all forms of ...”

“... gender roles but because women lacked the specialised training and equipment of knights. Far more often they served in support roles: supplying food for crusaders, doing their laundry, tending the sick, and providing sexual services, sometimes as prostitutes but more commonly as wives and mistresses. Many also ...”

“... represents the royal ragpicker’s challenge and Modernist recycler’s ambition: to create two or more words and meanings where there had been one, to make something memorable out of almost nothing.As extroverted singers offering discursive material, Armstrong and his contemporary Waller present striking, instructive contrasts. (Armstrong was born in ...”

“... Edward is easy to sympathise with, since his ordeal is essentially the ordeal of growing up. The more interesting figure in the parable, however, is the elder brother who stays at home. Here it is Thomas McCaskerville, Midge’s husband, a psychiatrist, who draws the parallel. He says to Stuart: ‘You want to be like the ...”

“... as a prototype of Robespierre or Calvin. It was an illusion to suppose that he had been any more committed to the freedom of the individual conscience than they had been; like them, his aim was to impose his own conscience as the rule of everyone else’s actions. Sorel took pleasure in teasing liberal intellectuals about the failings of their hero, but ...”

“... Moreland’s famous dismissal of the relevance and attractiveness of history. Less well-known, but more revealing, however, is the comment that Jane Austen was careful to insert not just before but after these irreverent lines in Northanger Abbey. ‘I am fond of history’ is Eleanor Tilney’s quiet but repeated rebuke: and since she is older than Catherine ...”