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“... of asking him how he is, and Campbell replies that he feels ‘both homicidal and suicidal’. He means it, too. All this makes his Diaries a strange read, because they are interesting, indeed fascinating, in many of their details, yet draining and demoralising in their cumulative effect. Reading this book is like standing listening to someone ranting and ...”

“... Half Has Never Been Told, Edward Baptist has identified this ‘whipping system’ as a pervasive means of increasing the productivity of labour in the cotton fields.* But neither of Cameron’s holdings resembled the ultra-efficient and immensely profitable enterprises Baptist claims cotton plantations had become by the mid-19th century. More often than ...”

“... Arthur; we must reject him from our histories and, above all, from the titles of our books,’ David Dumville wrote in 1977; and he was backed up by, for 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 ...”

“... and its immobilisation in infrastructure – a ‘spatial fix’, in the words of the geographer David Harvey – is one progenitor of Xi’s grand initiative. China’s treatment by the US is another.In October 2011, Obama’s then secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, announced the birth of ‘America’s Pacific Century’ in an article for Foreign ...”

“... is one source for the Hanged Man tarot card. All these 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 ...”

“... on a stock image developed over centuries, by painters especially. Brueghel in the 16th century, David Teniers in the 17th, and Joseph Wright in the 18th, all painted grimy scenes of reclusion and penury, with hints of mad obsession and radiant wonder. Cornelis Pietersz Bega’s alchemist, from 1663, adds pathos to the mix: were it not for the delicately ...”

“... Ben-Day dots devised by Benjamin Day in 1879 as a technique to produce a printed image by means of gradations of shading translated into a system of dots. More important, the Lichtenstein dots convey the sense, still fairly novel at the time, that mechanical reproduction had resulted in a sea change not only in representation but in appearance as ...”

“... superiority of market forces over all forms of statist allocation yet devised by man. By this means the new revisionists approach ‘socialism without socialism’.The whole thrust of the new revisionist writing, as I read it, is towards the increasingly inescapable conclusion that the socialist project is now forlorn, the age of socialism over. The ...”

“... by diaspora’ rather than community. He also refers to them as an ethnicity, by which he means ‘a social group with shared ancestry’. Whatever their beliefs, and no matter how long ago their family had converted, ‘their ancestry … was a permanent threat,’ something that could always be used against them. The historian must attend to lineage ...”

“... for burlesque, rather than for the tragic or pastoral mode of the works by Ingres and Manet and David which he takes as his sources. A visit to the Hôtel Salé in the Marais where the Musée Picasso opened a year ago is as exhilarating and depressing as a trip to the Royal Academy exhibition. Here, too, there are masterpieces from the artist’s own ...”

“... only just, on the side of those who rejected the proposition that sexual intercourse was simply a means of producing children. His relations with the opposite sex were ostensibly platonic and more than a little confused. On the other hand, he became solemnly interested in issues such as the ‘native question’, with a painstakingly balanced observation of ...”

“... a perspective which recalled the days in which feats of organisation were revered by Labour as a means of securing votes. Here was a political arcadia in which dozens of local parties could boast more than two thousand members, at least a tenth of whom could be relied upon to help rally the faithful when elections came. He blamed the declining faith in ...”

“... gentle stroking’ in the dark, with a slow, shared coming down. Men’s infidelity in marriage means little, for they are naturally promiscuous, whereas an unfaithful wife is a wife ready to break off her marriage. The ‘Coolidge Effect’ is the experts’ term for this contrast in sexual attitudes. On a Presidential visit to a farm, Mrs Coolidge asked ...”

“... that the lawyers regard Dicey as a Great Brain.) The problem with the Rule of Law is that it means very little if the executive can make up the law as it goes along. Ewing and Gearty show this happening continually in the interwar period. People were harassed, premises raided, harmless citizens arrested and imprisoned, meetings banned, crowds beaten ...”

“... but have won the respect of professional critics, who are favoured: V.S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, David Storey, Paul Scott, Iris Murdoch, for instance. Beyond that it isn’t easy to see much significance in the list – perhaps there’s a nostalgia for the old Empire (Scott, J.G. Farrell, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, plus Nadine Gordimer, Naipaul, and P.H. Newby ...”