“... to drench the parade of Enlightenment optimism about human possibility. The Radical writer Richard Price reckoned that an expanding population was a good thing, and that it would follow inevitably from more virtuous forms of government. Condorcet foresaw endless social progress, an egalitarian society in which technological advance would provide for an ...”

“... art, organised in 1760 by a group calling itself the Present Artists, included work by Katharine Read and the future Academician Mary Moser; exhibitions held subsequently by two rival associations, the Free Society of Artists and the Society of Artists of Great Britain, displayed larger numbers of women. (Both groups allowed submissions in non-traditional ...”

“... if he were a diagnostician of the spirit in which things are said. After admitting that he has not read enough of the Annales historians to provide an expert’s opinion of how they understand themselves, he says: ‘I can still go on to do something philosophers typically do in the absence of a command of the facts: I can ask what such a self-understanding ...”

“... mother’s maiden name, Janine Ceccaldi. As Demonpion reports, his mother ‘flipped’ when she read the book: she flew to Paris from her home in Réunion and considered sueing her estranged son. Houellebecq’s father, an admirer of Céline, was more sanguine when he found himself killed off at the beginning of Platform, in an updated and energetically ...”

“... politics of ‘lawful constitutions’ and ‘natural right’ – from the murderous madness of Richard III, you might say, to the enlightened benevolence of Nathan the Wise. Whatever might come of it in France, the French Revolution had ‘revealed in human nature … a capacity for improvement that no politician could have conjured up’ and, according to ...”

“... But Lewis is so much more at home with the Enlightenment and Romantic periods that she seems to read the texts in which Mary’s contemporaries and near-contemporaries sought variously to vindicate and to vilify her with 18th or 19th-century eyes, sometimes to distorting effect. Her account of The Faerie Queene, for example, ‘with its airy title and ...”

“... She had no formal education but her mother taught her Spanish, and gave her Castilian books to read. She could also understand French and Italian.Portugal had been ruled by Spain since 1580, and yanked into the Habsburg empire, which imposed heavy taxes to fund its wars. The Braganzas had a claim to the throne and, in 1640, João was urged to accept the ...”

“... wholly adequate to every detail in the universe as seen from every possible angle, no one could read it. A text that was adequate to every detail as seen from every possible angle would be unsituated; it would not proceed from a perspective – a ‘here not there’ – but from everywhere and therefore from nowhere. Human beings, however, cannot be in ...”

“... distance, transforming audience and speaker into a common ‘we’. It didn’t surprise me to read that she spent a summer playing Cordelia before American audiences in a student touring production or that, as a child, she came second to Elizabeth Taylor for the lead role in National Velvet. When that gift for performance is combined with profound ...”

“... described as ‘lethargic and incapable of concentration’ and ‘who was eleven before he could read fluently and at twenty he wrote like a child’. Instead, Roberts shows us a youth, not brilliant perhaps, but of inexhaustible curiosity and diligence, who spoke decent French and German and was the first British monarch to study physics and chemistry. He ...”

“... own confidence in the lectures was somewhat shaken by the criticisms of his friend Herbert Read and of the Italian polymath Mario Praz, then teaching at Liverpool, whose work in the same field Eliot greatly admired. In 1937 Eliot pronounced them ‘pretentious and immature’. Should one now agree with Schuchard that they contribute to our ...”

“... to that of the Mignonette, down to the fact that its cannibal victim bore the same name as the Richard Parker of the real-life story. Simpson says the coincidences were noted at the time of the trial, and it is also said (I do not know how reliably) that Dudley happened to read Poe’s story during the voyage and might ...”

“... as a fine traveller and considered Amurath to Amurath one of the best travel books she’d read, Freya was not ‘very fascinated by her as a woman’. At first sight, this judgment seems surprising. Throughout her active career as a traveller in the Middle East, Freya was compared with Gertrude Bell. Both women travelled in remote and dangerous ...”

“... with charm) is particularly striking. Johnston ticks off ‘undergraduate atheists’ like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, who have doubtless noticed this correlation, and scolds them for their errors about Spinoza, but I find Dawkins and Hitchens (and Sam Harris) companionable, as I find Johnston himself, and feel no resultant ...”

“... Shakespeare ‘warbling his native woodnotes wild’ in ‘L’Allegro’. Rather than being read as the last inspired musings of a rustic bard dreaming beside his provincial fireside or dreaming of it, Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale might simply have looked like symptoms of the courtly vogue for tragicomedy which had been spreading across Europe ...”