“... 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 ...”

“... any luxuriance à la Mary Renault. Instead we have a flatness redolent of the travel writings of Edward Heath. A busy market scene: ‘Traders from every corner of the world offered their wares.’ An expedition through a jungle: ‘The journey through the forest was pleasant. Birds of every sort were on the wing ...’ The dialogue, which acceptably wants ...”

“... of her prose romance Urania in 1621, Wroth became embroiled in a literary feud with the MP Edward Denny, who was outraged that she had drawn on members of his family for the allegorical characters in her book. He aired his grievances in a poem that took exception to women writing anything at all: ‘Work o th’ works, leave idle books alone,/For wise ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... deferential tone and what she was writing elsewhere makes uncomfortable reading. She joked with Edward Clodd: Mrs Hardy seems to be queerer than ever. She has just asked me whether I have noticed how extremely like Crippen Mr T.H. is, in personal appearance. She added darkly that she would not be surprised to find herself in the cellar one morning. All ...”

“... he becomes engrossed in electrical experiments and succeeds in turning his brother (‘Uncle Edward’) into the chime of the front-door bell. Other characters constantly appear and disappear, though in less radical fashion, throughout both books. They include the narrator’s ineffectual and inconsequential mother, the assistants in the store who are ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... setting, such as a big house, intensifies these conflicting pressures. (Alison Light has said that Christie’s novels can be read as ‘one huge advertisement of the murderousness of English social life and of the desperate need to convert to pleasure all those anxieties which an existence like that of the postwar middle classes could ...”

“... myopia from posterity, a spectrum of close to long-lookers can be drawn up: Hindenburg (+4.5D), Edward Gibbon (+4.37D), Martin Luther (+3.0D), Bismarck (−3.0D), Schopenhauer (−3.5D), Schubert (−3.75D), Beethoven (−4.0D), Gregor Mendel (−4.5D), Marie Antoinette (−4.0D), Goethe (−6.0D). The figures represent dioptres, which express the strength ...”

“... One time, someone gave me a slice of black bread. Another, a shy little boy approached and said his mama wanted to see me … We all walked up the dark stairs, a door opened, and a woman with a face wet with tears offered me a green open cardigan that I put on immediately. Everyone rejoiced at my acquisition and looked me over with pride, as if I were ...”

“... You know the left think that I am conservative,’ Hannah Arendt once said, ‘and the conservatives think I am left or I am a maverick or God knows what. And I must say that I couldn’t care less. I don’t think the real questions of this century get any kind of illumination by this kind of thing.’ The Jewish Writings make the matter of her political affiliation no less easy to settle ...”

“... early films, from Red River to Fred Zinnemann’s From Here to Eternity (1953), and then, after Edward Dmytryk’s Raintree County (1957), eight late films from Vincent Donehue’s Lonelyhearts (1958) to Raoul Lévy’s The Defector (1966), the caesura provided by the spectacular car crash that wrecked his face. There are three kinds of classic American ...”