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“... traces changes in what people chose or were able to record. From the very beginning, photographers took over the mundane job of representation in portraiture and topography. But they also wanted – or were asked – to capture on film things that were fleeting, strange or dangerous. Animals in motion, for example: a barn owl with a mouse in its beak, caught ...”

“... I noted down the names of Paul Ives, Graham Paine (‘who lost his life by drowning’), Clifford John Dunn, Ronald Alexander Pinn and John Hill, all of whom were born in the 1960s, as I was, and died early.The practice of using dead children’s identities began in the Metropolitan Police Force in the 1960s. Until very ...”

“... forty years, as a fiction editor on the New Yorker, he advised and goaded Nabokov, Eudora Welty, John Cheever and John Updike. Now, at nearly ninety, Maxwell’s face has a prairie gauntness, as if hollowed out by exposure to those bracing talents. But in Britain his name is almost unknown. He was born in 1908 in ...”

“... and finding one’s balance, and then wondering if one has really grasped the thing after all. John Donne’s poems in particular are extremely unstable. Critics have often got into a sweat about the way that they argue implausible cases, and very often, too, things happen in the course of them which make it quite clear that while the speaker is busily ...”

“... By 1963​ , John Cage had become an unlikely celebrity. Anyone who knew anything about music – who had perhaps followed the perplexed reviews in the New York Times – could tell you how he had managed to transform the piano into a one-man percussion ensemble by wedging nails, bolts and erasers between its strings; or how he had – ‘and you’re never gonna believe this’ – somehow composed silent music ...”

“... of Foot, the Royal Welch Fusiliers were not without social pretensions or indeed literary ones; I took vicarious pride in knowing that it had been the regiment of Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon and David Jones. They had no successors in my time. In Jamaica the officers lived a cheerfully philistine life, playing polo, attending cocktail parties and spending ...”

“... an important part of a concerted exercise in public persuasion. The same artist’s paintings of John Simpson’s ideas of how Paternoster Square would look if the latest Palladians were given control were a highly successful spoiling exercise which came very close to making people believe it was a real alternative to Arup Associates’ official scheme. An ...”

“... the Scottish science of man is embedded deep in institutions. Hume, Smith, Adam Ferguson and John Millar have become tutelar deities of campus and think-tank, the respected grandfathers of the social sciences and patron saints of the policy wonk. Yet, for all this familiarity, the otherness of the Scottish Enlightenment tends to elude us. Adam Ferguson ...”

“... saw as ‘dull and heavy’, Cobbett could seem to an almost eerie degree a living embodiment of John Bull. This was how James Gillray represented him at the time; and it was also how he enjoyed representing himself. He was ‘an Englishman’, he boasted in 1795, ‘a calf of John Bull’, and the older he got, the more ...”

“... Curiously, the first historian to query this complacent picture was the future arch-Eurosceptic, John Redwood, in his Reason, Ridicule and Religion: The Age of Enlightenment in England 1660-1750 (1976). This told the story of the assault on orthodox Christianity launched during the Augustan age by a variegated cast of libertine rakes, deists and heterodox ...”

“... Henry IV of England is ‘impulsive, changeable, irascible … unwilling to listen to advice’. John the Fearless, duke of Burgundy is ‘graceless, awkward and taciturn’, ‘brutal, cunning and duplicitous’, while his son, Philip the Good, is a playboy prince, given to ‘dancing, feasting, jousting, hunting and fornication’. Philip is admitted to be ...”

“... secretly or openly. In the late 1470s a redeeming aspect to this brigandage was discerned by Sir John Fortescue, a former Chief Justice of the King’s Bench. Writing on the governance of England he found occasion to compare the bravery of the English and the French. The English were obviously the braver nation, he argued, because English robbers were so ...”

“... cocktail party. The opening page of The Breezes (1995) clarifies the pessimism of the first novel. John Breeze’s mother was ‘killed by lightning’, we learn, but we mustn’t suppose lightning can’t strike twice. John thinks of Wile E. Coyote, whose crackpot attempts to catch Road Runner always meet with ...”

“... painting which has become known as the Sanders portrait, after Thomas Sanders, the man who in 1908 took it to Marion Henry Spielmann, author of the pioneering Portraits of Shakespeare (1907), claiming that a hitherto undocumented family tradition identified it as a likeness of William Shakespeare. Spielmann liked the picture, about which he wrote in the ...”

“... beautiful resignation in a place inimical to life itself, to be able to say as Scott did, ‘We took risks, we knew we took them; things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint, but bow to the will of Providence, determined still to do our best to the last,’ was quite as much to be ...”