“... to varieties of literary practice and authorial intention. Those tedious old rows of cabbages may, after all, represent a sovereign design: cabbages are kings, OK? This is a very interesting argument, presented with an energy and volubility powerful enough to command assent. I balk pleasurably at a few marginal things, but find only one matter that might ...”

“... In the 18th century, as the profession emerged from its gentlemen-and-surveyors phase, it may have seemed that art had rules – that aesthetic and practical decisions were of the same kind. This consensus on taste, if it ever existed, was brief. Intuition, often dressed as a moral imperative – Gothic is true, ornament is crime, displayed ...”

“... the market was for ‘bilingual’ dictionaries (especially Latin-English). We had to wait upon Robert Cawdrey in 1604 for a ‘monolingual’ model – aimed at ‘Ladies … or other unskilfull persons’. But the principles and goals are essentially the same. We don’t look up door to find that it means the chunk of material that seals off rooms and ...”

“... has the feeling of having stumbled into an allegorical jigsaw: Constance, Vittorio, Matt, Clement, May. Some of the Englishness can be attributed to Hazzard’s interest in verse. ‘The Sack of Silence’ borrows its title from Auden, whose combination of rationality and originality with occasional compression makes him a sort of grand panjandrum to ...”

“... Thucydides​ may well have been the first Western author to address himself to posterity. His forerunners – Homer and Herodotus, principally – show no awareness of a readership extending beyond their own time. But Thucydides called his work ‘a possession for eternity’, and spoke of the chaos of civil war as something ‘that is and always will be, as long as human nature remains the same ...”

“... the surface the big story was that Bush had finally sacked Rumsfeld, and installed the pragmatic Robert Gates in his place. But the more important story – concealed from the public – was that the president’s senior military advisers had lost all credibility: when it came to setting policy, the views of the active-duty four stars no longer mattered. By ...”

“... the constraints of real politics and the inner logic of the administrative mind. All this may well sound worthy but rather dull, and it has to be admitted that Professor Dilks’s volume makes heavy reading. Tory historians of the Feiling school used to beguile their readers by imaginative communion with the voices of the past, unencumbered by too ...”

“... left. Best supporting actress, Da’Vine Joy Randolph in The Holdovers; best supporting actor, Robert Downey Jr in Oppenheimer; best actress, Emma Stone in Poor Things; best actor, Paul Giamatti in The Holdovers; best director, Christopher Nolan for Oppenheimer. Best Picture? The word was out before Christmas, it will be Oppenheimer. There’s your big ...”

“... about the important stuff, Siegfried is elsewhere far too generous with detail, which may explain why none of Dunthorne’s family had actually read the memoir. Four hundred pages in, Dunthorne still hasn’t reached his grandmother’s birth, only her conception. At the time, Siegfried was working for Auer, a company that made lighting ...”

“... De Waal moves up several levels from genes and genomes to explore how individual animals may have evolved to want to help each other. He has a wonderful photograph of a dog stepping daintily over the head of a recumbent tiger, who opens an eye to look up as she passes. They live together in a zoo in Thailand. Zookeepers gave three tiger cubs to the ...”

“... with his rival from the radio, Chester Wilmot, Moorehead was an Australian by birth – and he may well have owed some of his success (not least with his employer, Lord Beaverbrook of the Daily Express) to a certain air of breezy informality. But there was also more than a touch of the grand seigneur about him – reflected in his automatic assumption ...”

“... 1895 were busy for Oscar Wilde. In late January he was in Algiers with Alfred Douglas. He wrote to Robert Ross: ‘There is a great deal of beauty here. The Kabyle boys are quite lovely. At first we had some difficulty procuring a proper civilised guide. But now it is all right and Bosie and I have taken to haschish: it is quite exquisite: three puffs of smoke ...”

“... Hump’ as Bloomsberries called her, was 11 years older than Julia. The astonishing success of Robert Elsmere (1888) made her the second most famous woman in Victorian England. Her poignant saga of a young Anglican priest who defects from the Church to rediscover God in the slums of London sold by the hundred thousand in Britain. In America, unprotected by ...”

“... Oxford, and ends with his valedictory in 1989 – all writings firmly historiographical. But one may easily detect the influence of his engagement in the contemporary war/peace debates in Howard’s treatment of the past: he writes of the decisions of 1914 or 1939 as the disabused observer of current policy-making, and with a sense of urgency that reflects ...”

“... rest of us have to make our neuroses fit in with the world around us – a touch of reality that may trim our unreason. The rich are different from us not just because they can afford to indulge their madnesses, but because they can pay other people to sustain their nightmares. This is a practical, rather than a moral point, and not one made by Charles ...”