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“... and William Ewart Gladstone, even if the apparatchiks’ own discovery of the name of the rose had to await the advent of the cordless telephone. They now speak of having provided suitable ‘packaging’ for a new and improved ‘product’. Marketing claims of this kind inevitably encounter diverse sorts of consumer resistance. Has Labour sold its ...”

“... of a man carrying a wrapped parcel just at the moment when a steam engine crossed the viaduct that rose above the end of street the result was as inexplicably significant as a musical phrase. Unlike Struth’s mighty panels it is almost as wonderful as a postcard as it is as an archival print. As photography moves into the museums of modern art it loses some ...”

“... his extraordinary intuition of the fatalities in the history of Russian power. The figure of Peter the Great fascinated him, and his first essay at historical fiction, ‘The Negro of Peter the Great’, was based on the career of his own maternal forebear, Ibrahim Gannibal, a black page presented to ...”

“... There was little to suggest, twenty-odd years ago, that Superintendent Andrew Dalziel and Sergeant Peter Pascoe would develop as they have, except Reginald Hill’s unusual and wise decision never to write consecutive novels about them.* Their debut in A Clubbable Woman (1970) came eight years after Julian Symons had first pronounced the ‘detective story’ dead; as late as 1989 T ...”

“... British killers – Ian Brady (See No Evil), John Christie (Rillington Place), the Wests (Fred and Rose), Dennis Nilsen (Des), Jeremy Bamber (White House Farm), Harold Shipman (Doctor Death) – while American true crime favours American atrocities. I don’t see my preference for the British product as some kind of weird patriotism. It’s written into the ...”

“... Steven Rose is a well-known public scientist who has dedicated his career to the study of brains. He has lived through the early days of the technical revolution that has involved increasingly powerful ways of imaging activity in the brain. But he is first of all a biologist. His guiding principle is that we cannot understand the human brain unless we understand how it came into being ...”

“... Yet outlandishly low temperatures alone cannot account for the tremendous success of Peter Høeg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, even if it does open with a bleak Copenhagen December, and go on to describe a still colder place – Greenland, covered by an icecap up to a mile thick, with a climate so severe that if you need to drop your ...”

“... first day of 1944. During the war he went on with his plans for Liverpool Cathedral, which never rose higher than the crypt. It seems unlikely that we will ever build in his way again. Mary Lutyens’s book is exceedingly readable. It focuses Lutyens’s personality, in a way Christopher Hussey’s 1950 biography could not have been expected ...”

“... to revaluations of women who had been overshadowed in a male-dominated art world, that her profile rose. Her portrait of Kate Millett was on the cover of a ‘Politics of Sex’ issue of Time in 1970 and there was a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1974. In her best pictures faces are loaded with information about attitudes and ...”

“... says all this about the bewildering richness of Wagner’s legacy with an eye on Paul Lawrence Rose’s Wagner: Race and Revolution, a book whose single-minded – albeit forceful and historically well-informed – account of the Wagner phenomenon renders the man and his operas pretty much as violent, revolutionary antisemitism. Reading ...”

“... The​ American photographer Peter Hujar once told a friend who was feeling unattractive: ‘As you’re walking along, say to yourself: I’m me.’ Hujar’s subjects seem to have heeded the same advice: they exhibit a self-possession tending to the monumental. You can see it in his 1981 portrait of the actor Madeline Kahn ...”

“... of the popular (as in lower orders) press. Marion Crawford, governess to Lilibet and Margaret Rose, started the rot by ratting on her employers in 1950. Which means that, like liberated and consequence-free sex, the period of royal mystery was brief, helped by the fact that a large war was going on for much of the time, when the intimate doings of the ...”

“... plain, he nevertheless manages to remind one of Hilliard’s young man standing in front of a rose bush. Milnes, the son of a cotton manufacturer, was radical as well as rich, and called his illegitimate son, born in Paris in 1792, Alfred Mirabeau. Thomas and Mary Coltman, again outdoors in fresh weather, she on a grey horse, he standing beside her an arm ...”

“... to declare their belief that Jesus died, was buried, descended into hell, and on the third day rose again. Paul explains that the requirement is reasonable: provided the dead can rise, there can be no reason to suppose Jesus did not do so. In fact if he didn’t, ‘we are of all men most miserable.’ Like Paul, the creeds also insist on ‘the ...”

“... the many allegories of the philosophical task, as she saw it, scattered through Gillian Rose’s writings, this one, from Judaism and Modernity (1993), is my favourite. ‘One must be able to give and take from others, to acknowledge difference and identity, togetherness and separation, understanding and misunderstanding’: so think of thinking ...”