“... to the flexibilities of our belief in them. But novelists do write to a present, and though there may be nothing of fishwives or moneylenders or hip hop in their pages, the language, the texture, the pattern, the ‘aesthetics’, have everything to do with the social pressure under which the book was written and under which it was initially read. Stendhal is ...”

“... for the moment and following intricate rules – will have said what he wanted to say, but he may also have said something he didn’t know he knew. He will have discovered meaning in what he has written, just like his reader. ‘This,’ Mathews writes in ‘For Prizewinners’, a 1982 lecture, ‘is the first way writer and reader participate with one ...”

“... from joining the fast track to economic modernisation? Bayly believes that in the long term Asians may have been the victims of the ‘relative peace’ their continent had enjoyed during the 17th century. While the stable empires of 17th-century Asia had nurtured pockets of ‘industrious revolution’, the ferocious wars fought by the comparatively ...”

“... Such is the familiar story and Clive Ponting tells it with verve and clarity. The Crimean War may lack the exuberance and wit of Cecil Woodham-Smith’s The Reason Why (1954), but instead it puts the war in its geopolitical context, reminding us not only that this was the largest and costliest conflict between 1815 and 1914 (the casualties slightly higher ...”

“... into destitution, but our better-off would be, in cash terms at least, better-off. Pollyannas may think that this middle figure shows we are steering an appropriately mid-Atlantic course between the horrors of unfettered capitalism and Eurosclerosis. Perhaps. But I think the state of Britain, seven years into a ‘progressive’ government, is a bit more ...”

“... he reorganised sections of Ibn Battutah’s erratic itinerary, a process that later copyists may inadvertently have continued. Ross Dunn, whose Adventures of Ibn Battutah provides an overview of the historical context of the journeys,* observes that Ibn Battutah was ‘highly unlikely’ to have used extensive travel notes or journals while working with ...”

“... Archeologia (1971). However erratic, confusing and deceptive the mass of archaeological evidence may be, it is surely out of place to write as if it did not exist. A glance at F. Coarelli on public building in Rome between the Second Punic War and Sulla will confirm that behind the major issues of the Gracchan period lies the rapid development of urban life ...”

“... there with unparalleled richness and range of illustration. You see every human type, and may eavesdrop on some of the most deeply emotional moments in people’s lives: separations and reunions of spouses and sweethearts, soldiers off to fight in distant wars, families off to start a new life in the Dominions, honeymoon couples off to ... whatever ...”

“... point of turning into something more – something very much more – accept the fact that this may never be? And if there was once, when young, a romantic wish to die, and a courting of death, what then? Will there be guilt, and a dark attempt to shift the blame?’ These are not real questions. Long before we can dial through to Ontario and press our own ...”

“... turned itself into a separate space-time continuum in which there is nothing but the poetry. This may seem so grotesque a point to make about the churchy, snobby, peopled, artlessly confiding and revealing world of Betjeman that it requires some clarification. Take the early poem ‘Death in Leamington’ – Betjeman’s ‘Lake Isle of Innisfree’, as it ...”

“... a simple visceral response to a preserved penis in a jar, then we should have talked because there may have been room for manoeuvre. Who knows, if the contents of the preserving-jar had been shrouded in murky liquid, its contents only to be glimpsed and guessed at, if it had been seen, once Maisie had broken the jar open, as undifferentiated grey tissue on ...”

“... Davies, through the Enlightenment administrators, to liberal Tories, or Gladstone and Asquith. It may be unfair to suggest that Johnson believes that the Irish always needed to be taught (though this is how the period of ‘Celtic disorder’ is portrayed), but he shows a certain sympathy for those who imposed real dominion ...”

“... something almost impertinent … Literature flies so high and is so hotly spiced, that our notes may seem hardly more than breaths of common air or draughts of water to drink.’ This apparent modesty is as rhetorical as the most florid bid for literary distinction. One of Whitman’s recurring motifs is his imagined dissolution of himself into a prospective ...”

“... MPs, less than a quarter of the popular vote and Reform vying to be Labour’s main rivals, they may look as if they are finished for good, which Kemi Badenoch tells us will mean the end of Western civilisation. But history suggests that it would be a mistake to write them ...”

“... Balzac’s work, and many of the generalisations we make about him won’t easily apply to it. It may be his most Romantic book: more lyrical, subtler and more autobiographical than most of the Comédie humaine. It is much less concerned with chronicling society or asserting the determining effect of economics and environment. The novel is structured as a ...”