“... It is also a work that only Defoe scholars – and perhaps not all of them – could ever bear to read. Defoe always fancied himself a poet. John Richetti notes that he wrote more lines of verse than either Milton or Dryden, though it is now almost all forgotten. ‘To some extent, that is a shame,’ Richetti observes, not quite believing that he is putting ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Richard Holmes published Shelley: The Pursuit in 1974. More than a decade later, in Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (1985), he recalled how obsessive his engagement gradually became, not just with Shelley, but with that whole group of English expatriates associated with him, as it moved from Geneva through Italy – Bagni di Lucca, Este, Venice, Rome, Naples, Ravenna, Pisa – shedding some members and adding others, before finally disintegrating when Shelley and Edward Williams were drowned off Leghorn in July 1822 ...”

“... in October, during what the Israeli Army called its ‘incursion’ – a euphemism inherited from Richard Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia – into towns under the nominal jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority. Young men distributed dry sticks of olive wood to dip into a barrel of fire. In Arabic and English, white banners proclaimed ‘Jerusalem is also ...”

“... until ‘at the end, instead of a picture, you get a perfect blank.’ That ‘blank’ Bangs read, ‘of course’, as Harry’s face – his critique is far from free of the gruesome misogyny you often get from men on the subject of beautiful women. I don’t agree with him. What I see is a disco ball, dark streets, Studio 54 and the Twin Towers, like ...”

“... conceded. But they had all been ouflanked. ‘Não é pelos 20 centavos,’ one popular slogan read: ‘It’s not about twenty cents.’ Two million people were on the streets across Brazil, but the MPL, along with other left-wing movements, found itself pushed out. ‘Sem partido!’ the newcomers shouted at anyone bearing any discernible political ...”

“... the editor of the Times, soon realised what a talent they had hired: Cockburn had long since read and absorbed almost the entire body of English literature, emerging as a wonderfully fluent and vivid writer. But his salary didn’t come close to paying for his untidy, riotous life in a huge Kurfürstendamm flat, and it wasn’t until 1929 that Dawson ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The first, taken from the Quarterly Review, advises: ‘If you love your reader and want to be read, get anecdotes!’ She did so with remarkable alacrity: in the 18 months after Charlotte’s death in 1855 she read hundreds of letters and interviewed scores of friends and acquaintances, from whom all sorts of ...”