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“... there can be, and after five hundred pages, 24 tables and more than 1600 footnotes it’s clear he has a point. His introduction (still more the publisher’s blurb) makes much of the book’s ‘innovative research techniques’, the need to shift attention from text to reader, from elite readers to working-class readers, and so on. Such work has not been ...”

“... sketch of the great translator Sir George Webbe Dasent: Of Herculean height and strength ... he resembled a Viking of old, and such I conceive he at times supposed himself to be ... He was two gentlemen at once ... In dull fact, he was an excellent ...”

“... has not seen the like of ‘since the Middle Ages’. Isuppose if you overlook the period 1914-45, he does have a point. Maybe it is this barbarism that excludes Kosovo from Europe? In fact, Kosovo, like anywhere else in the Balkans, is neither inside nor outside. The rest of Europe considers its status to be malleable:one moment the British press will ...”

“... the American theatrical manager Charles Frohman spoke his last words. ‘Why fear death?’ he was heard to say. ‘It is the most beautiful adventure in life.’ He may have been echoing J.M. Barrie, whose ‘awfully big adventure’ had only recently chimed with children of all ages. But the immediate circumstances ...”

“... showing a wasp-waisted Minoan jumping over the horns of a bull, she revisited again and again. ‘He seemed not to leap, but to hang above the bull, like a dragonfly over the reeds,’ she wrote in The King Must Die (1958). She was inspired to write that book after seeing the original on a visit to Evans’s fanciful but thrillingly evocative reconstruction ...”

“... the visuality of the detail. Hardy was supremely a man ‘who used to notice such things’ as he describes himself in his poem ‘Afterwards’. Most of his readers thrill to the precision with which he captures the world: the ‘scarlet handful of fire’ in the grate of Gabriel Oak’s hut in Far from the Madding ...”

“... Speke ‘discovered’, had indeed been remote from European knowledge. On the other hand, when he and Burton went to Lake Tanganyika, they had been on a track well beaten by Arab slavers, and knew exactly what they could expect to find. No one who has flown over central Africa below the clouds, as I did on routes taking me from Uganda to Kenya, then on to ...”

“... life in Britain, ‘Corelli’s sense of grandeur was the inverse of her sense of the absurd.’ He doesn’t stint his illustration of the point: A daily ritual was her progress round Stratford in a miniature phaeton, like Cinderella, pulled by two Shetland ponies . . . complete with coachman perched on high behind . . . Best of all, she was regularly ...”

“... subordinate, male female. But it’s one of Mr Rochester’s prerogatives to play whatever part he likes. As with labelling, as with jokes, so with costumes: it matters who is calling the names, who is putting on the pretence.When I was a little girl, one of my mother’s many wooers – she was in her twenties and later reminisced that ‘everyone’ in ...”

“... times – some parts of England are becoming almost as lonesome as the African veld.’ This was Rider Haggard’s conclusion after two years’ gruelling travel across the farming counties of England in 1901 and 1902. Only the odd Irish tinker trudged the dusty roads. Thistles and rushes invaded the untilled fields. The impression of desolation ...”

“... Wittgenstein had a phrase about the ‘great heart of Beethoven’, the rider to which was that it would make no sense to talk about the ‘great heart’ of Shakespeare. So much the worse for Beethoven, might be the sentiment of a non-philosopher who did not share Wittgenstein’s passion for music. But his point has its ramifications ...”

“... of Arizona was excavating the remains of a villa just outside Lugnano in Umbria in 1992 when he uncovered a fifth-century mass grave: 47 small skeletons had been interred in layers, some pressed into large amphorae. A number of them were newborn babies. The deepest layer held only a corpse or two, but the higher levels were increasingly ...”