“... he knows he is – knows what his absurdity is for – another. Ah, Helsinki in 2018! Only true masters of the medium know how to perform in front of the cameras like this. Signalling power, impatience, suspicion, superciliousness – not so much aimed in the direction of one’s fellow leader (that was part of the scandal), more at the spectacle ...”

“... as, if not equal to their own, certainly worthy of respect. Take the great Orientalist Sir William Jones (of whom Jasanoff might have made more), who declared Sanskrit – one of many languages in which he was proficient – to be ‘more perfect than Greek, more copious than Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either’. The Persians were, he ...”

“... Atlantic world. Travelling on to London that summer, Alexander was greeted by thronging crowds. William Wilberforce praised his anti-slavery stance in the House of Commons, calling him the ‘benefactor, not of Europe only, but of the human race’. Undeterred by Napoleon’s brief return to power in 1815, Alexander sought to confirm his status as ...”

“... not her real forename; ‘Crafts’ may be a tribute to Ellen Crafts, who with her husband, William, made a daring escape from slavery in 1848 disguised as a white male. Whoever ‘Hannah’ was, she lives now in the pages of her book, and we need to look within the text to find out who and what she was: and since it has many autobiographical ...”

“... it [the text] was telling me’. Maurice Blanchot once wrote that translators are ‘the silent masters of culture’. Kate Briggs amends this, commenting that Blanchot wrote ‘hidden masters of culture’ and that it’s ‘our recognition’ of translators’ ‘zeal’ that ‘remains silent’. In the publishing ...”

“... of the lip, ‘a happy, world-revering naturalism’. Artists of a naturalist dispensation are masters of Romantic empathy, ‘of projecting themselves into the things of the outer world, of enjoying themselves in them’, whereas ancient artists regarded that outer world as alien and confusing, a place one had quite enough of without having to also ...”

“... values which only the chosen few will be able to share or even decode. The irony of the Augustan masters was a sign-system of privileged implication, operating beneath a deceptive surface. The two passages I have cited are not discussed in Ehrenpreis’s book, but they are germane to it. In an earlier book of essays, Literary Meaning and Augustan ...”

“... genre conflates Groom’s forgery with his plagiarism. In 19th-century Ireland, authors like William Maginn, Francis Sylvester Mahony and James Clarence Mangan were in the habit of producing literary texts cunningly modelled on the work of some well-known author like Tennyson or Thomas Moore, which they then coolly claimed to be the lost original that ...”

“... friends, James Prior of Northern Ireland, Peter May of England, one of its cricket captains, and William Rees-Mogg, late of the Times, are among the tightest and funniest things he has written. May is present, while utterly silent, as a batsman of genius, and as a figure of fun and a pillar of rectitude during the urinous escapades which it is feared may ...”

“... are those which exclude the mots of the compiler himself. The tendency to line oneself up with the masters may be studied in Bartlett’s Unfamiliar Quotations, compiled by Leonard Louis Levenson, which contains more than a hundred and eighty entries credited to L.L.L.; in A Treasury of Humorous Quotations, compiled by Herbert V. Prochnow and Herbert ...”

“... this is a conventional work, reactionary in the extreme & dull to a degree.’ Among the dead masters Beethoven is adored, especially for Fidelio and the Missa Solemnis. Listening to Berlioz, the young man makes a nice distinction: the Symphonie Fantastique ‘isn’t much good as music’ but it’s ‘topping entertainment’. When he was at the Royal ...”

“... Men’s Association, a body which called for ‘rational’ organic reform: so organic that William Lovett, its figurehead, later turned to writing manuals on physiology, diet and anatomy. Although they drafted the original People’s Charter, Lovett’s men were soon overtaken by the Chartist leaders of the Midlands and the North: men such as Humphrey ...”

“... and the most intellectually distinguished of all European universities, the home of Duns Scotus, William Ockham and the Mertonian school. Volume III brings us to the Renaissance. We notice immediately the firm direction of the editor, James McConica, who has imposed an order on the writing of the history of the University in the 16th century that is uncommon ...”

“... lonely schoolboy from Christ’s Hospital. Through his study of the scientific work, Levere joins William Empson among others in defending the coherence of Coleridge and his metaphysics. Coleridge’s vision of a ‘dynamic’ German philosophy, pitted against Anglo-Gallic reductionism; his flirtation with chemistry ‘to improve his stock of ...”

“... stalemate and economic hardship had fuelled mass petitions and protests. The prime minister, William Pitt the Younger, had responded with draconian emergency measures, banning public meetings and prosecuting dissent as seditious libel. In 1796 a crowd of protesters – Despard among them – had besieged his home in Downing Street shouting ‘no war, no ...”