“... Christian martyrs, monks, Abelard and Héloïse, the troubadours, Dante. Next she moves on to David Hume, Goethe, Byron, Casanova, before concluding with a smattering of Netflix scripts and YouTube comments. Is this a history of love? Or a history of certain ideas about love? As the historian of China Eugenia Lean has argued, the ‘single ...”

“... wealth on art. There were similar attacks all over Europe, from the British Isles to the Balkans.David Freedberg, who teaches art history at Columbia (and who was, long ago, my dissertation adviser), describes himself as ‘haunted’ by the question of what it is about art that arouses such fierce responses. Most academic art history considers the social ...”

“... and not just because today bralessness has a different meaning, advertising that a woman is young, thin and lithe enough not to need one. The notion that there is or could be a ‘natural body’, unmediated by culture, now seems only slightly less quaint than the view that a unitary class of people called ‘women’ are forced against their will into ...”

“... had to be careful and was likely to be subject to gossip and censure whatever she did. As a young woman Kauffman was often described as a ‘coquette’: there was much speculation about her relationship with Joshua Reynolds, and Marat later claimed to have seduced her in London. There was no substance to most of it, but Kauffman knew the risks she ...”

“... Cicero referred to the poets of Catullus’ circle, disparagingly, as the Neoterics (‘The Young Ones’) or the New Poets, but their novelty was firmly rooted in the past, since they drew inspiration from the poetry of Hellenistic Alexandria of the mid third century BCE, especially that of Callimachus. Hellenistic culture, imported or looted, in the ...”

“... his one attempt at loving someone and caring for something other than his deep mental comfort, the young woman who had hoped to rescue him bitterly says, ‘How kind you are to yourself,’ and tells him to ‘rest easy’. ‘After all,’ she says, ‘that is where your happiness lies.’ Oblomov is not exactly a person, and this is only partly a ...”

“... to deal in biography: Duncan-Jones explores the case for William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, as the young man of the Sonnets; Weis points out such details as the greater frequency of medical characters in Shakespeare’s plays after his daughter Susanna’s marriage to Dr John Hall. Can we – should we – tell ourselves not to be interested in such ...”

“... in ‘the Village’. It was, he records with a Wordsworthian flourish, ‘a good time to be young in America and magical to be young in New York’. At Doubleday, a firm whose primary interest was its book club business, Epstein learned valuable lessons about mail order and how to package the product. Two years ...”

“... as though you’re having sexual intercourse’, while Neill prodded her stomach (she was too young to know what sex was, so she just panted). ‘The repressed ones have stomachs like wooden boards,’ Neill wrote to Reich of his pupils’ resistance, ‘but children begin to loosen up very quickly, and at once begin to be hateful and savage.’ Though ...”

“... at the best of times – failed to perceive their good fortune; they still don’t.Although David Trimble, the leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, had played a central role in negotiating the agreement, many unionists believed they had been conned. While the agreement won the near unanimous endorsement of nationalists in Northern Ireland, it was ...”

“... workers. The only way she can quiet these intrusive thoughts is by singing the first line of David Bowie’s ‘Kooks’ over and over.All Fours, July’s second novel, is about a ‘semi-famous’ interdisciplinary artist whose work is filled with ‘unlikely couplings, unauthorised sex, surrealism and a shit ton of lesbianism’. It would be easy to ...”

“... he made are also extremely pretty. Sunlight casts shadows of delicate wooden screens on walls, young women in elaborate clothes lead idle lives. There are bright flowers and pet animals. Surely this delectable environment, with its convincing sense of ease, is a true reflection of the timeless Orient – of a real alternative world? But Yeazell points out ...”

“... a younger brother. Talk three (five minutes) was a conversation between two sisters, usually one young and one senior member of the congregation; either the younger woman would ask the older one about a practical or spiritual problem that the latter would help her resolve scripturally, or the senior member would demonstrate how to break the ice on the ...”

“... jewellery and expensive clothes overlaying a diet-starved body, and the same clawed, no longer young hands about which nothing can be done whatsoever. Here, however, she is able to hide them behind the thousands of document files that surround her, a solid wall of research material on which someone has plopped a clearly reluctant cat. As those who have ...”

“... by a week. They would be embarrassed far more acutely when in the following year The Sorrows of Young Werther burst on the scene with its painfully obvious parallels, even to the name ‘Lotte’. The narrative was, as Lewes put it, ‘in many respects too close to reality not to be very offensive in its deviations from reality’. In connection with ...”