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“... but also loved them. His description of Carlyle is loving: Carlyle came – sat some time. Grand, good old man, kindest & best – Described being blown down the Embankment, like an egg-shell – so frail, yet so little susceptible of the bleak bitter cold. Dickens makes out that Podsnappery is founded in ignorance and narrowness. Mr Podsnap simply ...”

“... Haughton argues that Hill resists the temptation to succumb to ‘his glamorous rhetoric and grand style’, it is significant that none of the other contributors to this collection of critical essays raises the difficult political issues implicit in the poetry. Haughton’s fellow contributors all believe in the magical transcendence of art and the ...”

“... a Prince of Wales party, and fallen for her. She was 14 years younger, romantic, destined for some grand match. But the surgeon’s feelings may not have escaped her attention. What more natural than, like an adroit beggarmaid, to seek out in hard times the homely court of this Aesculapian Cophetua, and place herself under his protection? Lady Agnes’s ...”

“... was so rapid and strong. He found it easier to swim all the way from the Lido to Venice and up the Grand Canal to his palazzo; and took pride in the fact that he was then still quite hale enough to eat a ‘piece’ and retire to bed with Boccacio and ‘a black-eyed Venetian girl’. On that occasion he had been competing in the swim with a bachelor ...”

“... Jeff Koons, and his inflated cast of cuddly bunnies and miniature blown-glass bimbos, as a not so grand finale. In between, we have everything from Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Cole to Thomas Eakins to Thomas Hart Benton; from Mary Cassatt to Georgia O’Keeffe to Eva Hesse; from the Shakers’ minimalism (good) to that of Barnett Newman (bad); from ...”

“... more like trying to pick the winner of a race run on the flat, like the Derby, than punting on the Grand National, where one of the favourites could easily fall at Becher’s Brook. But for a late and largely undetected Labour surge in the run-up to the 2017 general election, Theresa May might now be steering us through the Covid-19 crisis: trusted, sensible ...”

“... were opinion formers like Joseph Addison, who airbrushed out Milton’s regicidal politics, or David Garrick, who turned Shakespeare from upstart crow into national bard; there were theoreticians of ‘original composition’ like Edward Young, who set a premium on the rejection of classical models; there were book-trade entrepreneurs whose huge poetry ...”

“... debate between historical experts. Now they listen to the platitudes of Simon Schama or watch David Starkey astride the gun barrel of a tank pontificating about Henry VIII. Blair Worden, leading revisionist and elder statesman of 17th-century political history, is on record as worrying that ‘public life has never been less historically conscious or ...”

“... Or Jonathan Lethem’s stoned underachievers, with their mad ideas that turn out to be right. David Foster Wallace gave us protagonists who shunned the physical world in favour of the knottier, more intractable challenges of the mind; George Saunders offers comic heroes who fail excellently. Turn the book over, lift up the flap. We don’t look too bad in ...”

“... military commanders have been as heavy-handed as Bremer and the CPA in Baghdad. In Mosul, General David Petraeus, the commander of the 101st Airborne Division, has been far more careful not to alienate the Sunni establishment in the city, which was a main recruiting ground for the Iraqi army (there are 1100 generals in Mosul because Saddam often paid off ...”

“... another example of ‘to fire out’ meaning what it is here taken to mean, and I notice that David and Ben Crystal, in their new glossary Shakespeare’s Words,* do not admit the venereal sense, giving only ‘to drive away by fire’. The poet is not even sure the parties have slept together, and could only have been certain of the consequence accepted ...”

“... with the breaking news except with compromises which concede very little. Most troublesome is the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani’s demand for direct elections by 1 July. On 16 January, a top aide to al-Sistani warned that ‘in the coming days and months, we’re going to see protests and strikes and civil disobedience, and perhaps confrontations with the ...”

“... resource, to cover the range from the ant to the rainbow, from the intimate or pathetic to the grand and cosmic. Fallon speaks eloquently about the variety of Virgil’s style in his ‘Translator’s Note’, and his new translation has some notably successful moments, above all when he is aiming at a more elevated and passionate register. He responds ...”

“... Change’. These pieces, together with McFarlane’s insightful work from the 1940s, David Morgan’s from the 1990s and a later Catto piece on ‘The Burden and Conscience of Government in the 15th Century’, are his lodestars. The Henry he gives us is largely familiar: deeply religious, just in temperament, firm and busily active in points of ...”

“... terrifying. He was also, when it suited him, sentimental, generous and capable of compassion on a grand scale. It is, perhaps, easier to imagine him reaching the top by his own efforts under the Soviet system than under the American one. It is also fairly easy to imagine what terrible things he might have done when he got there. Caro’s thesis, which he ...”