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“... of every culture, to resort to the stock means of dealing with the problem: the use of simple cross-cultural parallels, the belief that if it were possible to find instances of cat massacres among some remote and ‘primitive’ people, then the mere fact of the similarity would both preserve the strangeness of the deed and provide an explanation for ...”

“... camera movement was a profound shift in space and time but the camera was not moving now. Anthony Perkins is turning his head. It was like whole numbers. The man could count the gradations in the movement of Anthony Perkins’s head.’ The film continues to run, or crawl, and two men enter the room – Elster and ...”

“... identify Kircher as a mystical historian and philologist – one who realised that he could not cross the abyss that separated the present from the past by reading texts and grubbing in ruins. And perhaps that realisation set him on a different path: the kind of swooping, dramatic ascent that brought other mystics to their union with the divine. If so, we ...”

“... completely.In nine portraits – of antiquarians, palaeographers, philosophers and polymaths – Anthony Grafton describes the texture of intellectual life from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Grafton’s work has charted the development of scholarship, books, the classical tradition and of history writing itself in early modernity. He has written ...”

“... with riot, which at the time carried a life sentence. At their trial, Michael Mansfield’s cross-examination of the assistant chief constable of South Yorkshire, Anthony Clement, revealed the existence of the Public Order Manual. The judge ordered some pages to be released, containing ‘questionable ...”

“... has an entertaining way with a footnote: ‘Marilyn Davies (1944-2014), educated Sharmans Cross secondary modern school, Solihull; model, novelist, showgirl and entrepreneur.’ He gives us such information every time a new person is introduced into the narrative, and it shouldn’t be startling, but somehow is, that pretty much the entirety of the ...”

“... magazines and reviews lay the large underclass of book-writers who are the subject of Nigel Cross’s illuminating study. Hovering perilously between the lower slopes of Parnassus and the surrounding flat with its quicksands, they were the victims of the whimsical assumption, happily less common today, that anybody who can hold a pen can live by ...”

“... as the splendour, of the emperor’s new clothes. For the handful of liberals – Lord Scarman, Anthony Lester, Michael Zander – who have been arguing for decades that we need to have our rights and the government’s powers written down and invigilated by independent judges, the Nineties are looking like the moment of truth. That they were right about ...”

“... the conceptual possibility of crimeless war, and is this to be welcomed? Awkward ground to cross with any safety. As a sharer of my generation’s fate, settled one way or the other between 1939 and 1945, I have thought that the Nuremberg Trials and lesser assizes held in the wake of the Second World War were entirely necessary and even ...”

“... words win hands down. Their triumph seems to stem from a fierce and prior quarrel. Welchman cross-examines Morris Louis and Frank Stella and Anthony Caro as namers, and catches too much noise in them, as if he’d cracked the secret of Modernism’s purity – that it was really contaminated by a literariness it ...”

“... the Soviet Jews were systematically hunted down and killed. There were plenty of observers – Red Cross, neutral businessmen, conscience-stricken Germans, Jews who escaped – who let the world know what was happening. The Polish underground, which had agents in Kiev or Zhitomir or elsewhere in the Ukraine, could quite easily report to London through friendly ...”

“... seas was Poussin’s great mind voyaging? No one really had much idea until the publication of Anthony Blunt’s monograph in 1967, which argued that Poussin ‘thought in terms of Stoicism’, set forth ‘his views on ethics ... with clarity and vigour in his letters’, and ‘applied his philosophy to the practical conduct of his life in the most exact ...”

“... sources of inspiration before these became a matter for debate. This is important in considering Anthony Alofsin’s book, whose burden is that Frank Lloyd Wright was heavily influenced by the art and architecture of Europe. This is contrary to the received wisdom, which is that it was the European architectural avant-garde that was greatly influenced by ...”

“... Francis Galton and Henrik Ibsen, three historical figures woven into this tissue of intensely cross-referenced truths, halftruths and lies. As he stumbles around on the trail of Destry-Scholes, Phineas G. – short, spotty and socially inept – improbably acquires not one but two sexual partners: a sun and a moon goddess (as he puts it to himself). The ...”

“... we can only speculate as to what continues to hold up publication of the second. Partisans of Anthony Julius’s 1995 study, T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form, will have reached their own conclusions. The anti-semitic charge was squatting awkwardly on Eliot’s reputation long before Julius’s book, but old habits of deference died hard, even ...”