“... and the human touch which made him such a fine teacher. The long list of his pupils runs from Robert Kee at Magdalen in the Thirties to Kathy Burk, the last of his postgraduate students, in the Seventies. But a survey of the many historians he taught would show that in various respects they did not agree with Alan Taylor or indeed with one another. One of ...”

“... at a crucial moment, demanding if his legionaries intended to let these rebel ‘boys’, like the young Cato, overthrow him. Hitler’s record in the First World War was that of a junior NCO who really enjoyed it; and even in the Second he loved discussing with young officers such things as the best way to site an 88mm ...”

“... worked with James Guthrie at the Peartree Press. She might have lived in Hampstead and gone to Robert Bevan’s Sundays, or tramped with Eleanor Farjeon to Edward Thomas’s cottage. As it was, she found herself in Bloomsbury. Even if they were, as Quentin Bell called them, ‘as amorphous as friends can be’, they were nearly all highly literate, and ...”

“... and cold and inconsiderate. One begins to see parallels with Lawrance Thompson’s quest for Robert Frost: as Thompson, at first a hero-worshipper, dredged deeper into the material that eventually became his big biography, the hero began more and more to take on the lineaments of a monster. When she set out on her quest for the truth, Polly already knew ...”

“... Captain acted with such civility that he became Darwin’s ‘beau ideal’ before they left port. Robert McCormick, the ship’s surgeon and ipso facto naturalist, was so put out by the social preference and hindrance to his own efforts to collect that he quit in Rio and shipped home. (The tradesman-status of naval surgeons in the 1830s was notorious.) It was ...”

“... But it was his father’s paperback copy of Kant’s Critique which first introduced the young Gadamer to philosophy, and in 1919 he went to study the subject at Marburg, the centre of the dominant neo-Kantian school. He was taught by Paul Natorp and Nicolai Hartmann. In addition, Stefan George had a hidden importance, Max Scheler was a strong ...”

“... that this comfortable, kin-enfolding, welfare-providing family group not only nurtured the young, but took in their spouses when they married, and also provided them with shelter and succour when they became old or suffered other misfortunes. That the family in the sense of extended kin was a further source of welfare. It seems to be supposed that ...”

“... a heavy price had been paid for them. Much German scholarship had become dry and ponderous, as the young Nietzsche pointed out: but this charge could not be levelled against the greatest scholars, like Mommsen and Wilamowitz, and German Classical scholarship continued to flourish and to play an important role in the life of the nation until well into the 20th ...”

“... to have been unable or unwilling to play the social game at which his friend and colleague Hubert Robert excelled. In his infrequent self-portraits, Fragonard preferred to depict himself in the same tondo format that he used to paint his wife, Marie-Anne Gérard; his sister-in-law, Marguerite (who moved in with the couple in 1775); his daughter, Rosalie; and ...”

“... Robert Lowell​ has a poem called ‘Picture in The Literary Life, a Scrapbook’ which begins:A mag photo, I before I was I, or my books –a listener … A cheekbone gumballs out my cheek;too much live hair.Not knowing the photo of Lowell, I go instead to the picture of Seamus Heaney on the front of the companion volume to this one, New Selected Poems 1966-87, painfully young, worried-looking, Noh-rice-flour-pale, against a dark brick wall ...”

“... Opponents of this analysis – notably Matthew Goodwin, whose Revolt on the Right (written with Robert Ford) first identified Ukip voters as older and poorer than the general population – argue that the Leave/Remain faultline is essentially a cultural one. Among working-class voters identified as former or potential Labour supporters, the divisive issue ...”

“... earlier. (Associated as it is with a sexually transmitted disease, and administered mostly to young women, the HPV vaccine has been an alembic for all sorts of fear and anxiety around female sexuality.) In the weeks following the initial hospitalisations, another 75 girls from the same school came forward with similar symptoms; before long, five hundred ...”

“... taken art on as a sideline. Even the rival giants of American art criticism when Fried was a young man, Harold Rosenberg and Fried’s own mentor Clement Greenberg, started out wanting to be all-round literati before becoming specialists in the fine arts; but Fried, who was one of the first wave of art critics to have a PhD in art history, seems to have ...”

“... of the prospects and the profit of doing it. One of Baldwin’s earliest biographers, G.M. Young, is told off (nearly all previous writers on Baldwin are told off for talking nonsense of one kind or another) for initiating a strand of interpretation ‘where psychological or temperamental supposition replaces adequate historical ...”

“... most of his close friends (he was very well connected) had crossed the Channel: Geoffrey Winthrop Young, George Trevelyan, Geoffrey Keynes, Robert Graves (a former pupil) and Rupert Brooke (a contemporary at Magdalene). Another friend, Lytton Strachey, was renowned for his obsession with Mallory’s good looks (he credited ...”