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“... Greene might have been described as the Greta Garbo of modern English letters. He preferred to be alone. A wartime Penguin edition of England made me in my possession records on the back cover that ‘he … has always lived a quiet life and shunned literary circles.’ Widely regarded as, in Hugh Walpole’s words (quoted on the same cover), ‘the finest ...”

“... have buried the foundations of the mills. The house he grew up in has been demolished and replaced by a traffic island. The school which taught him the careful handwriting has made way for a supermarket. Such is the life of the industrial heartlands, and has been ever since the upheavals of the early 19th century when the factory towns mushroomed. There is ...”

“... on the walls. Its flaws as a setting for sculpture are the consequences of a single-minded pursuit by its main architect, John Russell Pope, of its underlying purpose, which was to provide a famous dealer in need of respectability, Lord Duveen, with a chance to display his munificence on a colossal scale. So the space seems designed to diminish any person or ...”

“... are told; scientific evidence is itself theory-dependent; and the difference between what comes to be regarded as good science and what as bad is often hard to discern without the benefit of hindsight. In this tradition, Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer have defended the first critics of Boyle’s famous air-pump experiments, which are supposed to have ...”

“... The historiography of modern Britain is dominated by one issue – ‘decline’. The usual starting-point for discussion is the fact that Britain’s share of the world’s manufactured exports has fallen from about 25 per cent before the Great War to around 8 per cent today, although much of this has nothing at all to do with Britain ...”

“... other upwardly-mobile members of the 18th-century middle class, sought to dignify his position by appropriating the identity of the noble amateur. In fact, in Britain the production of watercolours involved an unusually large number of different interest groups whose presence led to frequent schisms and altercations. Relations between amateurs and ...”

“... now fullest in its coverage of international relations, Taylor’s volume having been complemented by Paul Schroeder’s Transformation of European Politics 1763-1848. Zara Steiner’s new history will inevitably be measured against these distinguished predecessors, and it stands up to the comparison: considered as a ...”

“... the conquest of Europe, but on seven years of mostly undemanding peacetime soldiering, interrupted by long and frequent leaves of absence. Friendless and penurious, he did not devote his ample leisure time to the stereotypical debauches of the idle Army officer. Instead, as he later recalled, ‘I lived like a bear, always alone in my little room, with my ...”

“... tunnel and turn off up still more hairpins. Three days ago Anne and I turned back here, deterred by the notice warning us about Explosives, Landslides, Heavy Vehicles and Unauthorised Persons. We come out now onto a belvedere beset by dazzle, height and drop. This quarry is a mountain whose top they’ve been shearing off ...”

“... are easy to understand: people use money to get power and power to get money. The country is ruled by a narrow, self-serving elite who go through the motions of holding elections and transferring power. No one is fooled. When Putin moves from the office of president to prime minister and then back again, it is not exactly smoke and mirrors stuff. It’s just ...”

“... the expanding market, and the whiff of scandal associated with novels, only partly displaced by the Pamela cult of sentimental virtue, could be both disavowed and enjoyed when books were written by and for the French. But after Werther, and not least because of its success, many more ...”

“... In June 1999, a housewife and mother of three was pulled over by the police at a stop sign in St Paul’s, Minnesota and addressed by a name she hadn’t used for 25 years. Kathleen Ann Soliah had been a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army, the revolutionary group that kidnapped and supposedly converted the newspaper heiress Patty Hearst ...”

“... for long enough about feminism, deconstruction and literary theory. The term may have been coined by Stephen Greenblatt in an essay of 1982; if so it was already a restrike, minted from a prototype used by Wesley Morris in 1972 or perhaps by Roy Harvey Pearce in 1958. Greenblatt himself ...”

“... Lamartine winced at his cynical promotion of self-interest, and for Rousseau the method employed by the fox to relieve the crow of its cheese was as much an advertisement for flattery as a warning against flatterers. But though they mistook his observations of human behaviour for universal precepts, La Fontaine must take some of the blame. He was an awkward ...”

“... It’s a broad enough definition, in all conscience, though it has begun to do some useful work by excluding a wide variety of short fiction in prose, and some long poems, such as Eugene Onegin or Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate, which are not quite prepared to admit to being long poems. But it may be too broad. Forster ...”