“... that was a timeless humane truth about the horror of atrocity seeps away.’ The book bears the marks of its origin as a TV series: potted biographies of the founding heroes (Jackson Pollock and Picasso) interpolated here and there, scenic shoots in studios far and wide, and a haphazard structure. It does well, though, to place the Sensation lot in a family ...”

“... combat zones – ‘and turned into an area known to us as “India”,’ says Lance Sergeant Stephen Phipps. ‘We then made our way through the al-Mukatil al-Araby district. I’m not sure if we drove to Green 5 – the streets were getting quieter.’ The patrol was about forty kilometres from Camp Abu Naji and the vehicles trundled along a dimly lit ...”

“... to a boarding school where students didn’t have to study if they didn’t want to. There were no marks or prizes, and no punishments were imposed. John Betjeman described it as ‘a co-educational school to which modern authors and intellectuals send their sons’. Freud had no interest in academic subjects. Instead, he was fascinated by horses, and remained ...”

“... a boy pushes him into a ditch, he catches a cold. Finally we find the one place at school where Stephen is happy: the sick bay. Here he dreams about his own death, the remorse of the enemies who hurt him, the regret of his parents. Now language embellishes and consoles: ‘How beautiful and sad that was! How beautiful the words were …’ Later he compares ...”

“... questions, and warned that any answers he gave might be used against him at trial. Jervis’s Act marks the final transformation of a resonant aphorism, historically much honoured in the breach, into a sanctified principle of English law. It had by then been incorporated not only in the fifth of the Amendments made in 1791 to the Constitution of the United ...”

“... and it was thought that students returning at night from downtown would like to know, by visible marks and with some precision, how far they still had to go. The older fraternity brothers decided to use one of the new pledges as a rule, and selected Oliver R. Smoot, the shortest of the lot at 5ft 7in. The other pledges laid Smoot out at one end of the ...”

“... borrows a well-thumbed text (a text in which the reader has palpably invested their emotions), marks it, and makes it their own. Whatever the psychodynamics, Cunningham should have got to grips with this physical tactility. Perhaps he felt put off by the fact that the best work on bibliographical coding, on manuscript, print and mise-en-page (by Jerome ...”

“... met in my life I would apply the word “genius” to’, one colleague has said. Some go further: Stephen Hawking may have been a genius, but ‘Penrose’s insights seem to stem from some superhuman life-form’; his mathematics has something ‘magical’ about it. From early on, Penrose knew that he was intellectually exceptional, and he understood both ...”

“... to the English Augustans, but in Lucian it has particular bite. There is nothing that explicitly marks the ignoramus as a Roman citizen, but Lucian elsewhere blames the degradation of Greek learning on the fashion for wealthy Roman patrons to engage Greek clients (these may be the crowd of ‘flatterers’). The mini vogue between the 1940s and 1960s for ...”

“... a typically bourgeois sense of insecurity when she recalled the attitude of her father, Leslie Stephen, to money: ‘Not all his mathematics together with a bank balance which he insisted must be ample in the extreme, could persuade him, when it came to writing a cheque, that the whole family was not “shooting Niagara to ruin”.’ The ruling elite was ...”

“... Ben Jackson’s intricate account of the intellectual development of Scottish nationalism marks a highly original departure from the norm, and allows us to distinguish the various progressive themes that have since the 1960s enriched and transformed the populism of the SNP’s pioneers.There is, however, as Jackson notices, a lurking and ...”

“... hundred times. The pattern may be similar, the bipartite structure with its double bars and repeat marks may be the same. The content is never the same and rarely even similar. Handel is, of course, better-known than this. Or is he? The Water Music and the Music for the Royal Fireworks; Messiah; Israel in Egypt – is this the total tally? Surely Bach is the ...”

“... norms’ of an earlier era) as well as appealing to young American ‘revisionist’ scholars like Stephen Cohen, who wanted to decouple Leninism and Stalinism in order to rescue the former from the stigma of ‘totalitarianism’. Lewin’s next book, dauntingly entitled Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates, had Nikolai Bukharin – the doomed ...”

“... friends and colleagues of Professor Barton, ranging from American luminaries like Jonas Barish and Stephen Orgel to newcomers like Richard Rowland (who contributes a thumpingly good piece on Heywood). Shakespeare is still the most challenging object in the literary canon, the most generous with meaning and, at the same time, the most apt to find out folly in ...”

“... happen all over again). For evidence of this, one could do worse than consult The Mask of Anarchy, Stephen Ellis’s meticulously detailed attempt to understand how it was that young men dressed in wigs and bathrobes could eat the heart of a fellow human being in the belief that it would protect them from their enemies. Cannibalism was a persistent feature of ...”