“... Indeed, he complained about plans to publish some of the correspondence of his late friend David Hume, because it would encourage hacks and hucksters to ‘set about rummaging the cabinets of all those who had ever received a scrap of paper from him. Many things would be published not fit to see the light to the great mortification of all those who ...”

“... our relationship with the actor as the source of our fondness for film. She understands what it means to fall in love with a movie, with a movie star, and is sympathetic to the meanings such devotion creates. She wishes to describe the indescribable, the strange ecstasy of watching and sees this in religious terms, with Clift as a saint, his holiness ...”

“... it may be that Ariosto is following his immediate precursors, and elevating their material by means of the Virgilian echoes. There’s nothing tongue in cheek about Ariosto’s references to the wars that affected the Italian peninsula during his lifetime. Canto 14 begins with an excursus on the Battle of Ravenna of April 1512, at which French ...”

“... he also holds that a person must be a moral being, must be ‘capable of a law’, by which Locke means capable of grasping the import of a law in such a way that it can understand itself to be subject to it and thereby be subject to it. Locke also requires that self-consciousness have a certain temporal reach (if it didn’t reach into the past, one ...”

“... ones. Sharia, the environmental academic James Salzman writes in Drinking Water: A History, means ‘the way to water’. There were limits to what Salzman called the Right of Thirst: you could ask for water, but not for enough to slake the thirst of your camels or your fields. Water, in Salzman’s account, can be symbolic, ritual, vital. Every living ...”

“... helps to have a dad who was a bit (or more than a bit) of a rogue, as, variously, Greer, Ackerley, David Cornwell (a.k.a. John le Carré) and Tobias Wolff did. Ackerley’s left two letters, ‘to be read only in the case of my death’, in which he revealed his ‘secret orchard’: the mistress and three daughters he’d been hiding for many ...”

“... can’t give the impression of looking inside a mind directly, and must find its own equivalents. David Lean declared that in The Passionate Friends (1949) he had succeeded in photographing thought, though he was referring not to the film as a whole but to one sequence, in which Claude Rains’s character jumps to the conclusion that his wife is having an ...”

“... his Irishness, but the editors of this new edition of Goldsmith’s letters, Michael Griffin and David O’Shaughnessy, urge its importance, and they are surely right. Some of the ideas that persistently recur in Goldsmith’s work – opposition to imperialism, scepticism about English notions of liberty – seem to be manifestations of his nationality. He ...”

“... contemporary power with glamour and authority. Among the incisively captioned illustrations is David Wilkie’s painting of George IV in Highland dress – the outfit he wore for his entry into Edinburgh in 1822 (an event that was stage-managed by Scott) – opposite the playbill for a production in 1823 of Shakespeare’s King John at the Theatre ...”

“... Julian Barnes’s diary). He records meeting, in the same week, Princess Margaret, Ionesco and David Hockney. David Bowie offers to take over a part in The Real Thing; the Duchess of Devonshire appears as ‘Debo’ on page 33. Stoppard is not unaware of the effect: ‘I’m getting quite impressed by some of our ...”

“... in, such as Michael Winner’s Lawman or the Danny La Rue vehicle Our Miss Fred – or, indeed, David Essex’s Stardust. These films were out of reach, but only just out of reach. Forbidden fruit hanging almost low enough to be plucked.I knew that I wanted to read Offbeat as soon as I saw that it contained a chapter dedicated to the history of the AA ...”

“... he was writing a history of theory, partly because the painters did not correspond to the theory. David Solkin’s Painting for Money returns the painters to the story. Hogarth is here as well as other anti-civic humanist painters, and there is even a spokesman for the opposition to Shaftesbury, Bernard Mandeville. But Mandeville is presented as an isolated ...”

“... also do much routine plumbing and maintenance work, the unpredictability and suddenness of illness means that their role as mechanics cannot be separated from their priestly function. The scope of the former role has grown through technological advance, while the need for doctors to exercise a priestly function has expanded as our hopes decline for an ultimate ...”

“... reconstructs sexual norms from the actions – and the fates – of a few hundred deviants, David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch base their generalisations about the Tuscans and their families on one magnificent document, the Florentine property tax of 1427, which was based on a house-to-house survey of about a quarter of a million people. A typical ...”

“... away by rednecks, the ponderous Wyatt shakes his head: ‘We blew it.’ Billy has no idea what he means, because for him it was always about money, shiny machines, sex and popping into the carnival. I suspect that Hopper didn’t really get it either. This is, surely, the only reading of Easy Rider that can make it an interesting film. It’s seen as a road ...”