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“... of the crowd. Development and progress, Spencer had claimed, could always be defined as the passage from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous structure. Retrogression was literally the return towards the undifferentiated state. The ghastly image of retrogression to some inchoate mass of matter was thus frequently evoked, whether to characterise the ...”

“... built around the disappearances of Klara von Acht, daughter of Alois von Acht, and of the crown of Charles V. The girl and her friends die or go missing when they rashly walk out to meet their Russian liberators; the crown cannot be found in its proper place among art treasures stored in a salt-mine. These mysteries, although well enough sustained, at first ...”

“... from the company of Art’s immortals. Not without difficulty Millais persuaded her to omit this passage from later editions, on the grounds that he did not paint the picture specifically for Pear’s. Corelli’s regard for fairness and accuracy was never high. Occasionally she defends a statement with a footnote like ‘Said to me by one of the “lady ...”

“... ethnocentric quality of this material is a further cause for depression. The ‘history’ of the passage we have cited is the history of France, and of France alone – in this book anyway. What sort of history it is should be apparent in a moment. It is surely for the ethnologist to decide how such practices as those mentioned above bear on the issue of ...”

“... this fine biography. Mary Kingsley was the daughter of George Kingsley, the younger brother of Charles. The DNB gallantly falsifies the date of George’s marriage, which was only four days before Mary’s birth. His wife (thought to have been his cook) was a competent businesswoman and, unexpectedly, a good shot with a revolver. Mary learned from her the ...”

“... from anyone’s received idea of a poet. He wasn’t poor: in fact, he was very rich, the son of Charles Merrill, founder of the biggest Wall Street brokerage firm, Merrill Lynch. He wasn’t tormented – at least he didn’t have mental breakdowns or attempt suicide. He drank a lot but not famously and he eventually joined AA without becoming sanctimonious ...”

“... animate their voting behaviour, in this case, revenge. A Texan Representative had nearly secured passage of a resolution calling for a balanced Federal budget which, had it passed, would have gutted many pork-barrel projects and ensured the defeat of many of his colleagues at the next election. Seeing the supercollider roll past, the greasiest pork-barrel ...”

“... or far-reaching political reforms’ (the OED cites a 1793 instance referring to Charles James Fox); ‘Jacobin’ was the alternative used to describe more extreme positions that rejected reform. It’s hard to apply the latter term to Wordsworth, even if it was occasionally used of him (despite his meticulous Prelude revisions, Thomas ...”

“... to bodily inhibition took place quite slowly, however: Anthony Wood complained that when Charles II’s courtiers left Oxford, they also left ‘their excrements in every corner, in chimneys, studies, coal-houses, cellars’. True civility was the property of the city. ‘Since classical times,’ Thomas writes, ‘“rusticity” (rusticitas) and ...”

“... very different kinds of poet too: Robert Graves, Dylan Thomas, Octavio Paz, Louis Zukofsky and Charles Olson. As did any number of critics: Edmund Wilson, Harry Levin, Jacques Barzun, Lionel Trilling, Guy Davenport. Were all of them hornswoggled, taken in by the surface polish and acrobatics of Cummings’s style and, those who knew him, by his great ...”

“... fortnight under fire, and some 250 deaths, the British surrendered with a promise of safe passage to Allahabad. But as they pushed off into the river towards their haven, they were attacked by Nana Sahib’s men. Most were killed on the spot; 125 women and children were taken captive, only to die of fever or be slaughtered in a final purge soon ...”

“... time.’ Patrick is the damaged, scornful victim of his father, David Melrose, ‘descended from Charles II through a prostitute’. Centuries of damp arrest have created the monstrous David: ‘The expression that men feel entitled to wear when they stare out of a cold English drawing-room onto their land had grown stubborn over five centuries and perfected ...”

“... Ambrose did it to preserve his voice or because someone might overhear him reading a difficult passage and ask him to explain it. Scholars have, in turn, asked why Augustine found Ambrose’s silent reading noteworthy: was it simply his ability to do it, or the peculiarity of his solitude?What’s clear is that reading was, for most people, a fundamentally ...”

“... than non-French readers. But one should also beware the biases that such a background induces. The passage of time, including twenty years living in a British society not famed for its revolutionary fervour, have dented my youthful enthusiasm. But when I think or read about those events, I still feel emotional and – I make this confession because it reveals ...”

“... minister halfway through a war?’It was not a coup, not even a very British one. But it was, as Charles Moore describes, the result of a very Tory conspiracy. Thatcher fell following the first ballot of a leadership election among Conservative MPs in which she secured more votes than her rival Michael Heseltine but not quite enough to prevent the contest ...”