“... to pull free from the gravity of MacCabe’s introduction. My advice would be to skip this or read it at the finish. MacCabe feels the need to place the text safely within the corporate body of world literature, to find something else that is just like it. He flies a few kites on sex and chess and alcohol. He expresses earnest amazement on learning that ...”

“... in 1985) offers little more than a glimpse of a lifetime of painstaking research on Ruskin. Peter Fuller’s provocative Theoria was not a university product. There is no shared perspective in these books. Hewison and Fuller, Ruskin’s most polemical advocates, have made incompatible political claims for his thought. What they do have in common is a ...”

“... Pritchett merely plunges into him. But if the intellectual classes no longer know how to read a man of letters, and sad as this may be it is probably true, there would be no better way of rediscovering the art than through these essays. Their variety is huge and their range encyclopedic. Nor do they offer the slightest evidence anywhere of those ...”

“... others, Eric Griffiths. In an essay included in Geoffrey Hill: Essays on his Work (1985, edited by Peter Robinson), Griffiths expressed reservations about Hill’s ‘unsteady reliance on religious metaphors’ in his critical writings. In Hill’s essay ‘Poetry as “Menace” and “Atonement” ’ in particular, the idea that poetic language may escape ...”

“... do if you’re a bachelor, or James Goldsmith, or a lesbian, or Welsh, or a good-looking nun, or Peter Parker, or a social worker, or a cat? You could always (well, not the cat) try taking Waugh to court. But who would want to stand up in the Old Bailey and declare himself not ‘the silliest man in England’? And who would wish to be measured and perhaps ...”

“... a young cavalier being taught how to cheat at cards; in another a young cavalier has his palm read, and ring removed, by a pretty gypsy girl. These pictures were enormously influential, creating a whole new class of cabinet picture all over Europe, but they may not have been as original as is now assumed. In Caravaggio’s early paintings clearly-defined ...”

“... Brideshead Revisited. In fact, he doesn’t just pick it, he goes to pieces over it: ‘I have read Brideshead Revisited at least a dozen times and have never failed to be charmed and moved, even to tears.’ At least a dozen times? Well, if you say so. Still, it’s all good fun, we will be told, and it drums up business for ‘the trade’. I’m not so ...”

“... problem of the special moral significance of specifically human life which has led Michael Tooley, Peter Singer and James Rachels to some of their more bizarre views about the moral equality of the higher animals and some human beings. These are deep theoretical problems, which will not easily be solved. What is remarkable about these philosophers and their ...”

“... people are an aspect of journeying, as in immortal books like Evelyn Waugh’s Ninety-Two Days, or Peter Fleming’s News from Tartary. Bruce Chatwin’s narrative is divided by pauses for quotation and reflection. He has more than a touch of Rimbaud in him, and indeed he quotes from Une Saison en Enfer: ‘For a long time I prided myself I would possess every ...”

“... Attila, Genghiz and the like ‘fell outside the scope of Oxford’s history school’. He read military history instead and won his Blue as a boxer. In 1930 he was back in Abyssinia, attending the Duke of Gloucester at the coronation of the Emperor Haile Selassie, whom he had already encountered as Ras Tafari. There are sharp words for a fellow ...”

“... hostility to Clark was demonstrated by two incidents not long after his death. In August 1993 Peter Ryan delivered, in the conservative journal Quadrant, an extraordinary attack on Clark’s six-volume History of Australia, which he had shepherded through publication at Melbourne University Press. He was, he said, ashamed to have published it: Clark was a ...”

“... realise that he is, in his modest and quiet way, profoundly altering our views of the past. Like Peter Brown in his studies of late antiquity, he helps to free us from a Rome-centred view of the past, and allows us to recognise that the Eastern Mediterranean was the source of Western culture, and that the art of Ireland, Spain and Norway is as important for ...”

“... for or against those beliefs which are defended by an appeal to evidence. It is even possible to read the first edition of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions as endorsing something a little like Stegmüller’s view in those passages in which Kuhn speaks of the natural scientist’s acceptance of a new paradigm as often involving ‘a ...”

“... a mirror to his nose. She diagnosed paranoia. The Wolf-Man knew immediately what that meant: Uncle Peter. He had abandoned his mansion, set up a tent in a secluded field on his estate and had lived with his farm animals, believing everyone else lied to him. He eventually died of exposure and neglect and was found by his servants, semi-devoured by rats. That ...”

“... encyclopedic histories: in spite of being well over a thousand pages long, the book demands to be read from start to finish, from the Ice Ages to the New World Disorder, without selectivity. To begin by dipping and skipping is to miss the point, to break the spell and deprive oneself of a profound pleasure. In short, the bulk and the scope do not prevent this ...”