“... barefoot or otherwise. I then went to see K. B. McFarlane. My special subject in Schools was Richard II so I had been to McFarlane’s lectures on the Lollard Knights; I also had a copy of some notes on his 1953 Ford Lectures that was passed down from year to year in Exeter. I knew of his austere reputation and of his reluctance to publish from David ...”

“... 7-Eleven could knock out 30 Iraqi stores. A Wal-Mart could take over the country.’ On 1 May 2003, I heard the president, dressed up as a pilot, under a banner that read ‘Mission Accomplished’, declare that combat operations were over: ‘The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on 11 September 2001.’ I heard him ...”

“... more than others. It offers a rich array of choice, including such poetic and elusive pieces as Richard Long’s A Line Made by Walking (1967); Victor Burgin’s subtly sensory All Criteria, first published in 1970 in a Camden Art Centre exhibition catalogue for a show called Idea Structures; and Stephen Willats’s astonishingly dynamic graphite anti-grid ...”

“... and their reactions range from bewildered irritation to dismay. While the idea of being godlike may be attractive, being an actual god is less so. One is at the mercy of one’s worshippers, who tend to be demanding, dictatorial and impossible to shake off. Anna Della Subin’s Accidental Gods is a philosophical and historical exploration of the phenomenon ...”

“... fever, there were six children. The young widow took over his business; Toth argues that she may also have had an affair with a married roué, Albert Sampite, possibly the model for the seducers in her fiction. If so, it did not last long. In 1884, she returned to St Louis, and began to write. Her early magazine fiction was genteel and uplifting, but her ...”

“... both her grandfathers being admirals ... her uncle was Admiral Sir David Luce, and her brother Richard Luce, Minister of State at the Foreign Office.’ Lineage is of course the defining preoccupation of any aristocracy, and of non-aristocrats captive to aristocratic values, once a common type throughout Europe, now common only in Britain, although usually ...”

“... to class interest, or, more important, racial supremacy. If the thing is a genuine mystery, if, as Richard Lewontin has written, ‘we know nothing more about genetic causes of difference in social status and power today than was known to Galton,’ then the history of biological engineering, and genetics, is merely an aspect of the history of class or race or ...”

“... police preparations for the bank holiday weekend festival. ‘Committed historians’ was a phrase Richard Cobb used in The Police and the People to describe the police in France at the time of the Revolution. Their reports on crime and violence, in Cobb’s view, made them reliable witnesses, able to state what they had seen and heard, and to form an idea of ...”

“... can be made to appear instantly substantial by the manner and speed of their promulgation. Richard Henriques, a former High Court judge, has just concluded his review of Scotland Yard’s handling of the allegations made by Carl Beech, who was recently sentenced to 18 years for falsely accusing a number of senior figures of abusing children. ‘Never ...”

“... the most recalcitrant and ostensibly ephemeral sources, ingenious and gifted historians such as Richard Cobb, Olwen Hufton and E.P. Thompson have produced masterpieces of historical reconstruction in which the lives of the obscure and the downtrodden are given the front of the stage. There was, and is, a serious purpose in viewing élite culture and its ...”

“... of as only partially understood. The Vedanta centre is where Isherwood began his training – in Richard Alpert’s expression, ‘to become nothing’. The world is seen as mad, and forces the weary traveller from Europe to subject himself to a difficult regime of retreat and quiet. A ‘homesickness for sanity’ is the one valid reason for putting oneself ...”

“... Half-belief is formally honoured in a visit to the tomb of Unamuno in Salamanca, but doubts may occur at any time: ‘How is it that when I speak of belief, I become aware always of a shadow, the shadow of disbelief haunting my belief?’ and ‘I am riddled by doubts. I am sure of nothing, not even of the existence of God ... Oh, I want to believe that ...”

“... and space. A rather tetchy review of the Companion-less volumes of the Complete Works (LRB, 21 May 1987) complained at some length about the Original Spelling edition, partly because it represented what I took to be an unexplained change of editorial policy (there are arguments against such an edition, some of which the senior editor had quite recently ...”

“... Sticks and stones may break my bones ...’ Like most children, I learned this piece of wisdom with tears streaming down my face, hurt to the quick by the taunts of my playmates. At the time, it seemed a very foolish statement. What was this splitting of hurt into ‘real’ injury and ‘unreal’ feeling? I certainly felt hurt ...”

“... boys, so many girls, at deliberately decided intervals. Even the disposing of infants, therefore, may not have been incompatible with maternal or parental affection, any more than inflicting punishment or hardship was. It all depends, as it always must, on the culture, the attitude, the situation at the time: on the family concerned, on the personality of ...”