“... Constitution’s language raises such questions but does not provide answers. Nor is the document self-enforcing. Some provisions, like the free speech and equal protection clauses, were violated for decades before being invigorated in the 20th century. Others, like the guarantee of a republican form of government, have been entirely forgotten. During and ...”

“... time, personal and external constraints in behaviour became impersonal and internalised, until self-control, in the form of a new ‘economy of instincts’, became automatic – a process akin to the one Weber describes in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, when a religiously rooted attitude to work gradually became detached from its ...”

“... somnambulist helplessly perpetuates her ancestral crimes’. The Gothic situation is always a self-circularising time-warp from which, however, the reader has broken free, carrying with him, as it were, the now emancipated girl and the radical humanist lifestyle. Terror is cosily isolated, enjoyed because left behind. Politically speaking, there is an ...”

“... to see, unless it is that unlike most novelists she made her books out of a busy, open, outgoing self: not a brooded, secretive, internal one. The fact remains that I would rather read about them and about their background, in such an excellent biography as this one is, than re-enter today the world of her own novels. Jenny Uglow is an erudite ...”

“... sick with a cough and a temperature. By the end of the week, she has recovered, but we ask her to self-isolate for 14 days.5 March. The UK records its first death from Covid-19. In London, there have been four confirmed cases.7 March. I spend five hours in the middle of the day with the choir I run in Highbury in north London, rehearsing for a concert at the ...”

“... Josef Frolik, a Czechoslovak defector, who said Owen was on a £500 monthly retainer organised by Robert Husak, another intelligence officer at the Czechoslovak embassy in London. Owen, Frolik said, had been passing secrets to the Czechoslovaks since 1954. During his trial at the Old Bailey, Owen acknowledged receiving money but denied that he had given away ...”

“... forces of the recently deposed James II surrounded the largely Protestant city. Its governor, Robert Lundy, wanted to negotiate surrender as they didn’t have the resources to withstand a prolonged siege. But thirteen apprentice boys defied him and closed the gates. Lundy was banished, replaced by a stauncher man. The siege lasted 105 days. Derry’s ...”

“... or who has read Purity of Diction in English Verse (1952), will be familiar with this sort of self-regarding fury. ‘I should like to think,’ Davie ominously begins a sentence in Purity of Diction, ‘that this study might help some practising poet to a poetry of urbane and momentous statement.’ Like most practising poets, Enright did not take ...”

“... in holy orders: ‘They were the last people you would expect to be converted to the cause of self-pampering.’ Whatever the reason for their failure, the history of the Cambridge baths is a nice case of the ambivalence of the modern world’s engagement with the ancient. It shows the combination of enthusiasm and lack of interest, learned reconstruction ...”

“... and any attunement to religion has been filtered out. The effect is to make him not just self-taught – as he was known to be – but self-made, and to turn him into an unconsoled scrutiniser of mortality, a sort of outsider artist. It’s true that one of his teatrini depicting the effects of syphilis is ...”

“... this a precocious understanding of the value of the autographed work; or a piece of metaphorical self-dismemberment?) What she wants now is to become a hybrid of Flip and the land artist Robert Smithson, who made his mark on Utah’s topography with his immense coiling earthwork, Spiral Jetty. As Reno explains to her New ...”

“... the British reoccupied the East India Company’s settlement in Calcutta. In June a force led by Robert Clive deposed Siraj after defeating him in a battle near Plassey (Palashi), helped by the defection of the nawab’s key advisers and financial backers to the British side. The first account of the ‘Black Hole’ – as the room where the soldiers were ...”

“... 1933-45 that came earlier and was more intense than anything we find in Japan, or in Austria, self-styled ‘first victim’ of National Socialism. Earlier – but still delayed. In 1967, Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich published a famous book, The Inability to Mourn, on the collective German repression of painful memories after 1945. Norbert Frei ...”

“... by his widow with the customary bottle of champagne and went into service as a pleasure cruiser in Robert Ley’s Strength through Joy organisation, which provided ‘classless’ holidays for (some) members of the Volksgemeinschaft, subsidised by money seized from the trade unions. In the remaining years of peace it cruised the Mediterranean and the Norwegian ...”

“... shouldn’t own a relic connected with his better-known namesake. This someone was the self-styled Marie Corelli (whose real name was Mary Mackay), bestselling novelist and spiritualist, who was probably one inspiration for E.F. Benson’s Lucia, and was certainly the most conspicuous if not the most talented writer ever to live in ...”