“... 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 ...”

“... endless cabinet committees and a full-blown public enquiry, the Minister of Agriculture, Sir Thomas Dugdale, during the course of the Commons debate, announced his resignation. If relatively small events can excite such interest in Parliamentary minds, it is not surprising that there are plenty of people prepared to rake over the coals, at an appropriate ...”

“... have a deep-seated conviction?’Logic and certainty depart. After an investigation that produced more than a million pages of documents, and a ten-month trial featuring hundreds of witnesses, the cour d’assises was told to go with its gut.The deliberations came to an end on 29 June, when nineteen of the twenty defendants were found guilty of participating ...”

“... and smaller devotional pictures. Such works set a standard for later artists, one that was all the more authoritative in that Raphael’s figure style seemed to be based on the most prestigious model, the art of classical antiquity. That Raphael himself largely invented this interpretation of ancient art, on the basis of a few statues, most of them very ...”

“... a go at him to get some money,’ Reynolds told the police, ‘he gave me 10p and when I asked for more he said he didn’t have any and that’s when we started to stab him.’ There was also some mention of ‘dirty looks’, and these, real or imagined, probably did more to provoke the attackers. To describe the assault ...”

“... currently on display in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall (until 5 April), is a towering monument – more than forty feet tall – based loosely on Thomas Brock’s Victoria Memorial of 1911, which stands outside Buckingham Palace. Walker, an African-American artist who was born in California and lives in New York, first saw ...”

“... the person you’re most likely to take dictation from: before the 1870s, shorthand was used more often for recording one’s own thoughts or for copying others’, not always with permission. In early modern England, tachygraphy, tachography, zeitography, zeiglography, semigraphy, semography all vied for the loyalty of court recorders, parliamentary ...”

“... of justice. South Africa’s decision, which will become effective after a one-year delay, is more serious. On paper its constitution is one of the best; South Africa is also the continent’s do-or-die liberal-democratic model. Last year Bashir’s attendance at an African Union summit in Johannesburg was cut short by a local court’s decision to have ...”

“... is the family’s great collection of paintings, including first-rate 18th-century portraits by Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, Arthur Devis, John Opie, Jonathan Richardson and Richard Cosway, among others. The small, unattributed canvas he disposes of in 1928 is not in the same league. But it does come with an intriguing back story. Most of Henry ...”

“... years, returns to the fishing village from which he had fled under suspicion of having murdered Thomas Pole. Nearly everyone believes him guilty, since the two young men had been seen to quarrel. Both had been drinking heavily for a fortnight, and when Pole was found ‘with his head crushed under a fearful blow’ Doull took fright and bolted from the ...”

“... on the evolution of Pym’s character and Morrill on Pym’s relations with backwoods MPs; Peter Thomas on Court and country cultures) is intelligently deployed, but not always searchingly tested against the events Mr Fletcher describes. And Mr Fletcher is careful to warn us that ‘although this book contains a new narrative it is in no sense an attempt to ...”

“... order was therefore an individual and a societal imperative. Tyndall’s main inspiration was Thomas Carlyle, along with transcendental idealist philosophers such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Ralph Waldo Emerson. (Carlyle was Tyndall’s supporter at his wedding in 1876, Tyndall a pallbearer at Carlyle’s funeral in 1881.) To labour towards higher ...”