“... ever read) – Flecknoe, Mac Flecknoe aka Thomas Shadwell, Colley Cibber, piddling Theobald, Richard Blackmore – teems through the Grub Street grunge of Pope’s greatest poem, the mock-heroic satire on books and fools and publishing called The Dunciad. The dynasty of dunces established the notion that literary traditions and bloodlines do exist, since ...”

“... Schadenfreude that led gay activists to say ‘You’re next’ is now greeted by – straight, white – cries of ‘Oh no we’re not.’ Oddly, the critics do not consider the possibility that the campaign itself may have contributed, in the old industrialised countries, to the slowness of the spread of Aids; or that its acceleration in the rest of the ...”

“... the Oxford Movement pullulated with passionate attachments; two of the most frank avowals, which Richard Jenkyns quotes in his masterly study of the Victorian conception of Ancient Greece, came from Disraeli. Of course there were in the Nineties the Uranians and the aesthetes, disciples of Cory or Symonds or Carpenter, who justified their inclinations by ...”

“... hung in a rich man’s home. An early Botticelli showing a magnificently dressed Madonna supports Richard Goldthwaite’s thesis in Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy 1300-1600 that painters deliberately stimulated demand for devotional images by making changes in iconography and painting style. In theory bought to enhance the quality of prayer, such ...”

“... brother James had been on Captain Cook’s second voyage). There is Joshua Reynolds and Richard Sheridan, and later Madame de Staël and Talleyrand. In her ostensibly private records of her life, Burney often keeps pace with current events and personalities, providing the biographer with the background as well as the foreground of a Life. It is as ...”

“... naturalist and nature-appreciator – a tradition given great dignity and prestige by Gilbert White – had become something quite different from the activity of the professional scientist. In his Reflections on the Decline of Science in England (1830), Charles Babbage dismissed the amateur tradition of science as wholly inadequate to the serious ...”

“... paragraph cites, in no particular order, George Sturt, J.A. Baker, James Agee, Herman Melville, Richard Henry Dana Jr, Knut Hamsun and Elizabeth Smart. But I’m not being entirely fair. For one of these writers has already been singled out for extensive analysis.It’s an odd choice. Sturt’s The Wheelwright’s Shop (1923) is a book Davis would have been ...”

“... which was festering in a way that was obvious even to the US officials who visited. When Richard Holbrooke, the US special representative, and Vice President Joe Biden met Karzai they immediately saw the problem. In 2009, Holbrooke and Karzai tried to rig the upcoming elections in different directions. In the resulting mess Karzai remained in ...”

“... leg-ribbons, his high-heeled shoes, ‘fitted with greatest possible exactitude’, his ‘long white tunic’ and ‘dark-brown Circassian coat’. Byron’s is not the only ghost to be detected here: the cold hearts of his precursors Lovelace and Laclos’s Valmont are evident in Pechorin, who has succeeded in attracting a certain princess. ‘I’ll ...”

“... Katherine Mansfield standing in a London garden, with a line of washing hanging behind them like a white flag of truce or surrender); Lawrence’s severed friendship with Bertrand Russell; the suppression of The Rainbow in 1915; the dim years (1916-17) in Cornwall, when the Lawrences were being investigated by government authorities as possible German ...”

“... a tense, silent moment in a comedy, made even more tense by the sharp contrasts between crisp white linen and black velvet, and by a dramatic diagonal of light on the plain wall behind them, which parallels the line of eye contact. Even the unsententious may be inclined to feel that some smart adage about blind youth is neatly embodied here, but Bersani ...”

“... the role of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. I happened to be in Delhi in 1982 soon after the release of Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi. One sunny winter afternoon, a group of us were tormenting an Indian co-producer of the film, accusing him of selling out to Hollywood and all that. After several minutes he turned on us: ‘The film was not made for people like ...”

“... The chapters by Susan Watkins (on Nato and Russia), Régis Debray (on Nato and France) and Richard Seymour (on Nato and the UK) demonstrate its depth. But this is marginal dissent all the same. The alliance’s official motto – ‘animus in consulendo liber’, ‘in discussion a free mind’ – is almost unknown. But since Russia’s invasion of ...”

“... source’ and the ‘priestly source’ so paradigmatically that the biblical scholar Richard Elliott Friedman uses it to explain the documentary hypothesis in his book Who Wrote the Bible? (1987). Other interpretative problems include dating the Flood and measuring its extent. Where did the waters come from, and where did they go? As the English ...”

“... in a prose that looked decidedly non-experimental – pure, classical, like something carved from white marble.’ Even so, a host of critics (mostly male) simply missed the point. Among other things, the decidedly odd and unsexy ‘Miss Cather’ was deemed to be insufficiently engaged with Big Social Issues. During the Depression she came under violent ...”