“... close to unseating the Kaiser. Nancy Mitford said it was one of the very best novels she had ever read and Evelyn Waugh ‘saluted a new artist’. Proustian in its preoccupation with money and rank, it has the charm of the dying Europe in which it is set: a world where the very rich, when they went to take the cure, travelled in a private railway carriage ...”

“... this picture has of late been injected with new life and massively disseminated by the success of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, whose veneer of shocking realism and occasional flights of pure fancy hardly conceal its basic reinscription of the romantic image. It was time for scholars to hit back, and Amadeus was cited by H.C. Robbins Landon as a main reason for ...”

“... the Tories: those papers’ readers were going to vote for them anyway, whereas the Sun was being read by a large number of people whose affinities had traditionally but unimpassionedly been with the Labour Party. Chippindale and Horrie quote Lord Blake on these voters: ‘fairly young, slightly inclined to Labour, largely belonging to the skilled working ...”

“... teacher. Criticism and Ideology (1976), which begins with an attack on Williams, is perhaps best read as a belated result of the student revolution at what Althusserians call the ‘level of theory’. Literary criticism was now to be scuttled in favour of an anti-humanist ‘science of the text’ in which the production of art was dialectically reduced to ...”

“... the treaty bound the sovereigns not only to one another but also to those they ruled. It could be read not only as a private agreement between monarchs but as a public commitment to constitutional and international reform. Nakhimovsky shows that networks of largely Protestant republicans and reformers engaged in elaborate interpretations of the Holy ...”

“... novel and an extended Bildungsroman, Pontoppidan’s narrative follows the vicissitudes of Peter Andreas (Per) Sidenius. Like the author, Per is born into a clergyman’s family in East Jutland in the 1850s. After defeat to Germany in the war of 1864, a third of Denmark’s territory is annexed, and the boy grows up in a period of national ...”

“... for women’ versus ‘boats for women’. Enzensberger must have missed it, or we should have read all about it. The feminist dimension is not among the elements of Titanic mythography to which the poem devotes much attention. It is confined to a few bits of lurid bizarrerie: Three cheers for the Countess Rothes in her ...”

“... speak of homology among DNA sequences as easily as among tetrapod fore-limbs) that it is easy to read into Geoffroy’s claims an evolutionary meaning he did not intend. The homologies that he saw, or thought he saw, were as far as he was concerned, placed there by the Creator. It was the age of what would be called Transcendental Anatomy. The Darwinian ...”

“... that doubtless have more to do with my childhood than my professional integrity, I feel obliged to read every word of any book I review, but though I doggedly and probably neurotically followed Dr Cook through all her youthful adventures, I confess to skipping pages and pages devoted to the various horses she owned and her anguish at their individual ...”

“... story of the Enlightenment’s steady diffusion outwards from its Parisian source. In the 1960s, Peter Gay gave them new power in his brilliant extended essay The Enlightenment: An Interpretation. Gay recognised the international dimensions of the Enlightenment, and included Scots, English, Germans and Italians as well as French in what he called the ...”

“... chauffeur and footman in fawn livery to pace up and down in formation after lunch. It is sad to read about the day seven chauffeurs mutinied over their treatment by a sneakily parsimonious cook. Two fussy maiden ladies who asked about the cost of stabling their Austin Seven were told ‘If you care to take it up to your bedroom there will be no charge for ...”

“... Leiris. It has pondered the theory of the sign, foregrounded photography and helped to install Peter Bürger’s 1974 essay ‘Theory of the Avant-Garde’ (translated into English in 1984) as a founding text of alternative cultural criticism. October’s influence on arts professionals has been powerful and lasting, though the editors in feistily refusing ...”

“... remarkable. The original text says, ‘Il y a beaucoup de hasard en tout ceci,’ and we get to read, in the different translations I will describe in a moment:There is a large element of chance in these matters. [Terence Kilmartin]Chance plays a large part in all of this. [James Grieve]There is a great deal of chance in all this. [Lydia Davis]There is a ...”

“... pioneering work of Samuel Johnson, and rival the efforts of 19th-century European lexicographers. Peter Gilliver, in The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (2016), characterises the movement that led to the formalisation of the Philological Society’s proposals as ‘a groundswell of what might be called lexicographic nationalism’, and the OED has ...”

“... So he argues that St Bernard of Clairvaux represented the new scholastic learning of Peter Abelard as pedantry, which encouraged ‘curiosity, novelty and a dangerous reliance on human reason’, while ‘the figure of the humanist pedant developed into a negative stereotype that highlights the antisocial characteristics of these learned ...”