“... representational skill and – in England at least – the most marketable. It was a gift which Thomas Gainsborough showed early; in one account, so impressing a friend of his mother’s when he was still a boy that his father was persuaded he should go to London for instruction. But this talent wasn’t necessarily combined with other painterly ...”

“... groups, and others, are reported from time to time, the ‘Movement’ which the writers knew is more or less moribund: its members are living in the West, or have been exiled to Siberia, or are in jail, or are dead (some of them, like Yuri Galanskov having died in jail), or have simply fallen silent. And no wonder, when the price of dissent or protest is as ...”

“... takeovers, the Latin American drug trade, the troubles of the International Tin Council and five more glorious years of Thatcherism are all somehow part of the Same Thing. But are they? The play itself kicks off with a prelude from Thomas Shadwell’s The Volunteers, or the Stockjobbers of 1692 (‘Look ye Brethren, hye ye ...”

“... a plateful of corpses, embryos and fluid from mammary glands, who wouldn’t baulk? But there’s more to this recoil of Josie’s than just calling things by their proper names. There’s more to it, too, than a fear of flab. Josie reacts to food as an ascetic – St Thomas Aquinas, let ...”

“... look provincial. Tudor patrons weren’t generally prepared to pay much for pictures, and were more concerned with the documentary function of a painting, its cost and size, than with its aesthetic qualities. A proclamation of 1563 recommended that London painters be paid less than carpenters and goldsmiths. Much of the labour was done in workshops by ...”

“... hand ‘so we might have some conception of the amount of genius that slavery is murdering’. But Thomas Jefferson compared her to a parrot and thought her poems ‘below the dignity of criticism. The heroes of The Dunciad are to her as Hercules to the author of that poem.’ In a context where figures including Kant and Hume used aesthetics to confirm racist ...”

“... military logic of their Chiefs of Staff if and when the issue arises of using nuclear weapons? On more than one occasion the political control which the Prime Minister insisted was being exercised over the Royal Navy. Lord Lewin, incumbent Chief of the Defence Staff in 1982, has described how the War Cabinet came to authorise the mid-April retaking of South ...”

“... was plunged into the serial conflicts we call the Thirty Years War.From The Hague, Elizabeth spent more than two decades pursuing restitution of her husband’s Palatine lands and privileges, alternately assisted and frustrated by the fortunes of the Stuart monarchy in Britain. The dust jacket of Nadine Akkerman’s biography shows a composite portrait of ...”

“... throughout his career, it was Trevor-Roper’s patrician anticlericalism which distinguished his more progressive – because freethinking – brand of conservatism from what he perceived as the type of right-wingery that might lapse all too easily into a fascistic authoritarianism. Trevor-Roper’s very individual and historically informed reading of ...”

“... and villages, clearly targeting non-military objectives. Hundreds have been killed, and thousands more have fled: in one incident, the Azeris showered cluster bombs on homes in an Armenian-populated city. But the military efficacy of drones on the actual battlefield is less obvious. The Azeris did grind out territorial gains, but in fighting that largely ...”

“... morning harden upon the wall.’ One can see, with the help of these lines, the light becoming more solid, more densely itself; and of course our mornings harden in a different way, too: our days tend to begin loose with possibility, and then harden around us as the lost hours progress and we feel their unfreedom ...”

“... first great celebrant was James. The fact that there are no Jamesian novels being produced any more – if there ever were, apart from the Master’s own – does not alter the perspective. The Jamesian model remains a standard, an archetype, against which contemporary impurities and laxities are measured. The importance of James lies not so much in his ...”

“... was given a further boost by a rare, cryptic – and surprisingly ungainly – endorsement from Thomas Pynchon, who described Mills’s novel as a ‘demented, deadpan comic wonder’ with ‘the exuberant power of a magic word it might possibly be dangerous (like the title of a certain other Scottish tale) to speak out loud’. Later, a great deal of ...”

“... republic of letters. Despite its geographical remoteness, and in part because of it, it sent its more ambitious and industrious sons almost everywhere abroad to study. The three universities of medieval foundation were essentially undergraduate colleges, but, as John Durkan has shown, Scots as students and teachers had roamed abroad since the 15th century to ...”

“... is why Mr Mortimer chose this moment of his life to write this book. One senses a motivation more pressing than the importunities of hopeful publishers. There is hardly a publisher in London who doesn’t solicit a known name to write a book on the specious ground that everyone has a book inside him. The accumulation of unreadable books proves the ...”