“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Faced with the average book of modern literary criticism, the reviewer may wisely resolve to say nothing about the author’s skills as a writer of prose. If they ever existed, they would very likely have been dissembled, for many now believe that to write well is to act in bad faith, even to risk the charge of fascism ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... venerated antiquity and suggests a promise (however empty) of social benefit. Whatever Versailles may not have been, it certainly was a public building, a stage set for the sovereign to play the spectacle of power.’ But the same could be said of the sheikhs of Abu Dhabi and Dubai, who aim to draw businessmen and tourists by the jet-load to witness the ...”

“... example to enthusiastic religious groups, or to wayward individuals, served certain purposes. That Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy was, as Johnson thought, magisterial, and unread. Above all, that madness was proximate to Reason, indeed twinned to the idea of ‘Reason’, and that madness was the secret history of the Enlightenment, its exhausted ...”

“... Parliament Trust have done less to write the history of Parliament than to prove that its history may be too complex and amorphous to write at all. Ironically perhaps, the fact that several of these familiar reservations apply to the new four-volume The House of Commons, 1386-1421 does not detract at all from its resounding success. In the first place, as ...”

“... in books about composers – for human interest is easily assimilated by the non-musician. It may be considered more useful than German (and hence American) scholarship, but it can hardly be denied that it does not make for good historical writing. The Cambridge Music Guide is an obvious offshoot of the English school, and a rather old-fashioned example ...”

“... to his Romantic forbears. The method of the book means that we have to attend to a great deal we may have heard before, such as brief expositions of Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Schiller: but it is true enough that the ideology, the pathology and the eschatology of the period under discussion have connections with those thinkers and many others roughly their ...”