“... mythomaniac, a cheater,’ he’s labelled in passing – a colourful, piratical parenthesis, no more. In fact, a younger and different Christine Brooke-Rose did once write up the adventure of the Search for Dad, in conventional style, in a novel called The Dear Deceit, in which she disguised herself as a male narrator and went to town on the details: dad ...”

“... a little pop. The way the sunlight was falling, I couldn’t see Peter’s hand in the water any more, but I knew it must be sliding up behind the fish, perhaps even touching him now, stroking him so he thought there was no danger. Then came the thrashing lift and the fish clutched in mid-air – just for a second – the yellow eye glaring, the greeny-blue ...”

“... handicapped by his lack of ‘intellectual and social training’. Lawrence probably scandalises more highbrows than lowbrows these days, but not as many as he bores. The academy remains moderately attentive, of course. Monographs and collections of essays appear at regular intervals. The Cambridge Edition of the Works proceeds monumentally.1 Indeed, even ...”

“... one end of the island to the other, searching for answers to the same questions. My conclusion (no more scientific than that of the CIA – by what process did they arrive at that figure of ‘about 20 per cent’? – but perhaps less constrained by the need to tell my paymasters what they expected to hear) was that one-third of the population appeared to ...”

“... as group biography, since the principals have to share top billing with Mrs Inchbald, Sheridan, Thomas Lawrence and Mrs Jordan. There is a curious line of contact between several of these figures: four of them were the subjects of biographies by James Boaden (1762-1839), who happened also to edit Garrick’s letters. Ms Kelly mentions these lives in her ...”

“... of the player piano in the United States. Over fifty years on an outmoded entertainment? There is more here than meets the eye: ‘Agapē Agape is a satirical celebration of the conquest of technology and of the place of art and the artist in a technological democracy,’ Gaddis wrote in a proposal from the early 1960s. ‘As “The Secret History of the ...”

“... instance, J.N.L. Myres in 1986: ‘No figure on the borderline of history and mythology has wasted more of the historian’s time.’ In his new book, Nicholas Higham cites neither opinion but certainly knows of them, and indeed, in the end, agrees with them (except about book titles). Still, whatever historians may say, legends of King Arthur have remained ...”

“... examples attest to what the art historian David Freedberg calls ‘the power of images’, which more puritanical critics might see as fetishism writ large. ‘To be adored or punished, to be welcomed, dreaded, or expelled,’ Heller-Roazen concludes, ‘the image of the absentee is each time “wanted”, after the manner of its wanting subject. The fragile ...”

“... In​ The World Is Flat, published in 2005, Thomas Friedman argued that global trade and finance, presided over by international institutions – the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO – were making the planet not only richer but less hierarchical and unequal. This was a pumped-up version of the Enlightenment theory of doux commerce, which held that growing trade, founded on mutually beneficial contracts and the rule of law, would provide opportunity and riches for all, and eventually consign wars, empires and great-power politics to the past ...”

“... of ‘Julia, Daughter of Claudius’. ‘I did it for a joke,’ she told the Daily Mail. A few more poems followed, and then, as she hit her stride, a Stakhanovite eight works of fiction in eight years. In October 1940, a bomb demolished the room of her own, and Trevelyan died a few months later at her parents’ house in Bath. ‘Never Recovered from ...”

“... usually decisive, are now tried summarily before the stipendiary magistrates. Few cases have been more important in the history of jury rights than what is known as Bushel’s Case (1670). This is the case of the Quakers, Penn and Mead, indicted at the Old Bailey in that they did preach and speak to persons in the street assembled, by reason whereof a great ...”

“... medium; for example, to capture the mobility of bourgeois types on the town, the sketch might be more useful than other means (the exemplar in the essay is not the great Manet but Constantin Guys, who was then known for his quick studies). What better vehicle to convey ‘the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent’ – key qualities of the metropolitan ...”

“... Material Place – ‘All men say “What” to me,’ Emily Dickinson wrote in a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson. She certainly mystified Higginson. He never entirely overcame his uneasiness about her odd, disjunctive words and bewildering epistolary tones and seven years into their correspondence still complained of being unable to get beyond the ...”

“... for the established place of Roman history in contemporary English-speaking culture and (even more) education. Books on familiar subjects continue to be written, and to find publishers and – presumably – readers. One of the five, indeed, is offered with the sole justification – outdated by the time the book appeared – that no biography of Pompey ...”

“... through domesticated rape; and grudging, conniving admiration for an unscrupulous New Woman, a more cosmetic version of the pushy dames lampooned by Thurber, and a preview of the ruthless, raunchy Women’s Libber who was on her way. Selznick might have warmed to her. Soft-faced and fastidious, he seems at last to have broken out of the dutiful son’s ...”