“... things look rather different if you approach them from a classical standpoint. Collingwood himself may have chosen not to reflect on the influence of his formal education; he became more concerned to attack the whole history of professional pedagogy as far back as Plato. But it is surely crucial that he was a product of the old Oxford ‘Greats’ (that ...”

“... and educational qualifications – in other words, class.’ This assertion, unremarkable as it may seem, represents a substantial advance over multiculturalist anti-racism, since the logic of anti-racism requires only the correction of disparities within classes rather than between them. If about 1.5 per cent of your population is of Pakistani ...”

“... his poetic “I” . . .’ Such assurances are merely comfortable seats from which we may safely enjoy Seidel’s Guignol, remnants of an academic orthodoxy with no room for extreme autobiography. It has been almost 60 years since Cleanth Brooks wrote that ‘the typical professor of literature in the graduate school’ would find the severance of ...”

“... failure was a crushing blow for faith in reason. Zoya’s exile from the scientific city of hope may be Red Plenty’s saddest chapter. (As she is en route to her departmental show trial, the great Kantorovich absentmindedly waves to her and, in a parody of her own precarious situation – or his – slips on the ice. ‘Just another fat little zhid falling ...”

“... was once burned in effigy by the plain people of Haworth with a potato in his hand.* The Brontës may have tried to become plus anglais que les anglais, in a long tradition of literary emigration to these shores, but their neighbours weren’t fooled. The family was lower middle-class, caught between a hard-headed contempt for the gentry whose pampered brats ...”

“... but simply quite nice and quite sexy, which doesn’t often happen in thrillers, however common it may be in real life. It turns out, conveniently, that Berger has an open marriage, and the two heroes go to bed with each other on a regular basis. This has caused Blomkvist’s marriage to break up, but only because of his wife’s petty jealousy; denying two ...”

“... Underworld’. Tóibín is also the novel’s UK publisher, under the Tuskar Rock imprint, which may have something to do with it, but does Christos Tsiolkas’s prose really bear comparison with DeLillo’s and Franzen’s? Would either of them publish a sentence like: ‘She did look her age but looked fantastic’? Or: ‘Sam’s abandonment of her had ...”

“... of 2008? Ferguson argues strongly that it does not. The advent of the hostile takeover bid may have presaged a more aggressive style of capitalism, but the eurobond market was in many ways financially conservative – turning hot money into a stable source of long-term capital. Ferguson’s main point, however, is that Warburg was a strong advocate of ...”

“... this explanation ‘stimulated a babyish interest that lasted through my life’. The collecting may partly have been compensatory: Wellcome went on spending sprees when he suffered loss or rejection, for example when he divorced his wife, Syrie, the daughter of the founder of Barnardo’s Homes. He married her when he was 48 and she was 22. It was a ...”

“... isn’t a biographer who makes excuses or concessions in the hope of holding on to readers who may be sympathetic to some aspects of his subject but sceptical about others. He wants his readers to agree that Hoggart is ‘someone who has met the moral duty of the citizen to look out hard for the best parts of our history and has sought to make them tell in ...”

“... By a bizarre twist, G.K. Chesterton may be en route to sanctity: it was reported in August that the Bishop of Northampton has begun a suit for his canonisation. Diarmaid MacCulloch doesn’t invoke Chesterton’s miracle-working powers, but he opens this expanded version of his 2012 Gifford Lectures with a Father Brown story, ‘The Oracle of the Dog’: by howling at a certain time, the animal gives the priestly sleuth the clue to the murder weapon ...”

“... generals succeed and become celebrated, to contrive excuses to have them killed. ‘A man of power may do little himself, yet gain glory through his retainers,’ a soldier says on the eve of a battle, while Yoritomo is safely ensconced on his estate in Kamakura. It could be the motto of the new feudal age. ‘The Heike felt still caught in ice,/like birds of ...”

“... worry and tenderness are everywhere in them. The story of 1937 is very different. From January to May, Nabokov is in Paris and London trying to organise his financial fate; Véra is in Berlin with Dmitri. Nabokov is also having an affair with a young woman called Irina Guadanini, who lives in Paris with her mother, and is one of his great admirers. Her ...”

“... of a guillotine blade terminates any simple-minded reveries. The constant flow of objurgation may have functioned as a relief from the mental pressure of it all, but if so, the reprieve was temporary. In December 1966 he hit rock bottom. He was ‘extraordinarily depressed’, unable to get up in the morning, condemned by his ‘outsider’ status to ...”

“... political reform. In ‘a bright day, of which we already behold the dawn,’ he announced, ‘we may look forward with confidence to a state of society in which the different orders and classes of men will contribute more effectively to the support of each other than they have hitherto done.’ The essential structure of society, however, would remain ...”