“... 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 ...”

“... Christen Købke (1810-48); while in 2014-15 the National Gallery showcased the less well-known but more extraordinary Peder Balke (1804-87): one of those rare artists whose pictures became smaller as he got older, and whose scraped, scratched grey-and-black oil-on-board images of the Northern Lights are among the most surprising pictures I’ve seen in the ...”

“... Autobiography, published nearly twenty-five years ago, remains an indispensable pioneering work; more recently John Pilling’s Autobiography and Imagination provided some interesting studies of particular autobiographies by eminent Anglophone or Continental writers but without much discussion of the nature of autobiographical form. Jerome Hamilton Buckley ...”

“... After the first death,’ Dylan Thomas wrote, ‘there is no other.’ I know what he is getting at, I suppose, but it isn’t true, at least not for me. I have had other deaths, but the death last month of my friend Michael Rogin was a shock. It’s not that we had, in recent years, spent much time together. I left Berkeley, where we taught together on the faculty of the University of California, in the mid-1990s, and almost immediately lost touch with most of my network of friends ...”

“... was reading his mind.’ There is a section break, and Byatt continues: ‘Dorothy had indeed, more or less accurately, followed Philip’s thoughts. She did not know how she had done that. She was a clever, careful child, who liked to think of herself as unhappy.’ We have instantly entered, with the finality of fairy tale, a familiar Byattian world, in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... when launching operations.The exact number of US special forces is classified, but there are more today than ever before, and they are deployed in almost every country in the world. The point of covert action, of course, is that we’re supposed to know very little about it. But here the system falls down, since even secret operatives can’t help the ...”

“... there is also something in Ulster straightness – a dour literalism – which repels groups more accustomed to the sunny give and take of everyday evasion and hypocrisy. During the Troubles the outside world found it easier to romanticise the Provisional IRA than to sympathise with the resilient negativity of Ulster Unionism. Unsurprisingly, Unionists ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and canons to the left and right volley and thunder, this dignified Fellow of Balliol has done more to change our view of the 18th century than many avowed canon-chargers with more ostensibly up-to-date artillery. In the production of these two anthologies Lonsdale changes, not just a book list, but our view of the ...”

“... himself never published and which appears in Additional Poems, after Last Poems and the posthumous More Poems, there does appear an almost inevitable element of self-cultivation. The poem opposite, also of four lines, is a different matter. Now to her lap the incestuous earth       The son she bore has ta’en. And other sons she brings to birth ...”

“... this in a novel way. The most recent stage in Gaia’s evolution, he says, began in 1712, when Thomas Newcomen succeeded in building the first practical steam engine for pumping water. Newcomen’s engine ran on coal, and his invention set in motion an ongoing chemical interaction. Many early steam engines, including Newcomen’s, were used to control ...”

“... wrote in his diary. ‘It no longer mattered that I was a foreigner, that my English was broken. More than anything else we all wanted to defeat the Nazis.’Forty-Ninth Parallel (1941), their next film, was intended to convince US audiences of the need to join the war; it also showed the British government that movies could play an important part in the war ...”

“... long, several thousand tonnes of opium were being grown in India every year, using new and more efficient methods; India would henceforth supply most of the opium consumed in East Asia and China. The amount of opium imported into China increased from about two hundred chests a year in the 1730s to sixty thousand a year in the 1880s. The industry had ...”