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“... wrote a double biography of the literary Brothers Mann, giving equal billing to the celebrated Thomas and the neglected Heinrich. It was certainly time to look again at Heinrich, whose importance as a public and literary figure had been taken for granted by an earlier generation of writers. Gottfried Benn called him ‘one of my gods’; Lion Feuchtwanger ...”

“... artists. It’s not hard to see why. The man who produced The Face of the Ruling Class (1921), a savage collection of political cartoons, was also the author of aesthetic credos that perfectly anticipated the Party line. In 1920, Grosz published the short essay ‘Instead of a Biography’:The art of today depends on the bourgeoisie and will die with it. The ...”

“... to a friend when the crisis had passed. And yet that tyrannical, and as I think, shortsighted Savage insists upon another two ... really a doctor is worse than a husband! Oh how thankful I shall be to be my own mistress and throw their silly medicines down the slop pail! I never shall believe, or have believed, in anything any doctor says – I learnt ...”

“... controversy and led several months later to the famous debate on evolution between Wilberforce and Thomas Huxley at the Oxford Museum, appeared in the Quarterly Review, which was published by Murray’s. The editor was John Gibson Lockhart, but we aren’t told why he chose to commission what was guaranteed to be a ...”

“... Any pushy, worldly man or woman of letters would like to find and befriend a Thomas Warton. The great 18th-century editor of Shakespeare, Edmond Malone, certainly recognised his usefulness. Malone, single-minded in his pursuit of standards of textual scholarship that would trump preceding editors of Shakespeare, knew that his friendship with Warton was uniquely helpful ...”

“... In August 1867, Thomas Carlyle published one of his most virulent diatribes against ‘swarmery’, by which he meant the trend towards democracy. The immediate inspiration for ‘Shooting Niagara: and After?’ was the threat of Disraeli’s Reform Act, which would double the number of adult males entitled to vote, and thus, as Carlyle saw it, unleash untold ‘new supplies of blockheadism, gullibility, bribability, [and] amenability to beer and balderdash’: look at America, the beleaguered Sage of Chelsea argued, and its absurd Civil War, prompted by what he derisively called ‘the Nigger Question’: Essentially the Nigger Question was one of the smallest; and in itself did not much concern mankind in the present time of struggles and hurries ...”

“... could have been a lot bloodier if it weren’t for her Orphic ability to soothe the terrorists’ savage breasts with her singing. You have to admire Patchett for her unabashed way with cliché. The rooks in the vice-presidential chess set for some reason have horses’ heads, but Patchett makes no such imaginative substitutions when it comes to national ...”

“... that she would only produce under pressure, then ‘but now she has moved on’ is layered with a savage faith and tenderness and is none of Mrs Anderson’s business. The relationship at the heart of Paradise, the love story that gives the novel what shape it has (drink has a tendency to make things lose their shape), is between Hannah and Robert, an ...”

“... at work are not so much mythological as metereological. Richard nearly dies trying to survive the savage Vermont winter in an unheated room: Henry arrives in the nick of time to save him. A freak late snowstorm spoils Henry’s otherwise perfect plan for doing away with Bunny without arousing suspicion. The weather also contributes a great deal to the ...”

“... tomorrow, tomorrow we will devise other stratagems.’ According to Samuel Johnson, his friend Savage manifested a comparable ingenuity in distorted ratiocination: ‘Savage ... did not suffer his esteem of himself to depend upon others ... he contented himself with the applause of men of judgment; and was somewhat ...”

“... The bronze-brown autumn dusk! And the half-lit territories of street and bed and heart Are savage and full of risk. On bronze nights When the territory is half-lit by casual glances He sweats, each step is hideous! Once he knows his strength of course he will be ruthless. It’s Eliot’s ‘violet hour’, but 1950s streetlamps make it a grimy ...”

“... geologist John Wesley Powell, who led the first expedition through the Grand Canyon in 1873. Thomas Moran, an experienced painter from Philadelphia, travelled with Powell, and had been to Wyoming and Montana with the US Geological and Geographical Survey two years earlier. The chief fruit of his journeys were his paintings of the Yellowstone and Colorado ...”

“... ambitious project. Its guiding spirit was Henry’s ‘angel-tongued’ lord chancellor, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, the man in whom, as the Venetian ambassador put it, ‘the whole power of the state is really lodged’. In war-ravaged 15th-century Europe, an old idea began to gain new impetus: the dream of a unified Christendom, bound together by its one ...”

“... to Helen’s story is that of a small Trojan boy who hides from the Greeks – of whom the most savage is Achilles’ son, Neoptolemus – in a well. As Menelaus leads Helen away through the burning city, ‘in the well it grows hot. The flames that are romping through the city, eating it up, suck out the air from the well-shaft till there is none left to ...”

“... are withering under competition from the Internet and a purge on library acquisitions even more savage than the purge which is destroying the viability of the monograph. And, of course, the learned journal – given its association with dusty work in libraries – is inherently unsexy (when was the last time the LRB notes on contributors credited a ...”