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“... that in an absorbing essay about elbows in Renaissance painting. She concentrates on 17th-century Holland, where one particular stance – indicating, she thinks, self-possession – almost achieved the ‘status of a national attribute’. A surprisingly large proportion of militia company portraits include one or more figures with an arm pugnaciously ...”

“... everyone in England a boss?’ ‘I don’t understand. “A boss”?’ Caleb explained. ‘In Holland, everyone is a boss: they are missionaries or doctors or teachers. Here we have farmers. Are you all bosses?’ ‘Well yes, many of us are “bosses” but we have farmers, too. They have farmers in Holland as ...”

“... stolen: ‘When you’d started a world war, murdered Jews and taken people’s bicycles away (in Holland) the odds were stacked against you.’ Only when Frau Winkelvoss is touched up by the car thieves does she allow herself to doubt the essential decency of all Poles. Meanwhile she pressures Jonathan to go easy on the historical aspects of their tour: will ...”

“... problem of the special moral significance of specifically human life which has led Michael Tooley, Peter Singer and James Rachels to some of their more bizarre views about the moral equality of the higher animals and some human beings. These are deep theoretical problems, which will not easily be solved. What is remarkable about these philosophers and their ...”

“... radicalism of the English sects was not parallelled by anything produced in no less sectarian Holland or Transylvania. But this leaves unaddressed the question of what that possibly mythical being a ‘European’ – or more realistically an Italian, Dutch or Polish historian – is to make of these strange and terrible transactions and the modes of ...”

“... our understanding of power. At Berkeley he ran a seminar from which two other major books emerged: Peter Brown’s The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (1988), which explored the theme of carnality and spirituality, and Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (1990), which offered a ...”

“... will never be cured no matter how many years go by.’ Thirty-six years went by and in 1982, in Holland, Harry Mulisch published De Aanslag, a novel in which Anton Steenwijk, aged 12, watches his family home, the house he has grown up in, reduced, in a matter of minutes, to rubble, by the action of a couple of German grenades and a flamethrower. Standing ...”

“... approach here is to cut the Vikings down to size. This is the method associated with the name of Peter Sawyer and it has brought some striking and happily controversial results. An alternative is to exploit hitherto neglected types of evidence, in particular royal charters, in order to look more closely at the work of earlier kings, both in Mercia (after ...”

“... in early Georgian England. In Evelyn’s own day, young trees were more usually shipped from Holland. I come from what D.J. Taylor has called the ‘pavement-pounding’ school of biography, perhaps particularly because buildings and landscape have been my preoccupation for so long. When I was researching my biography of John Soane I worked in his own ...”

“... depends on their rivers and mountains, frontiers and coastlines. In The Earth Transformed (2023), Peter Frankopan added climate to the list: drought in Central Asia caused the fall of empires in Europe, and the Little Ice Age did the same for the Ming dynasty in China. Jonathan Kennedy’s Pathogenesis: How Germs Made History (2023) studied plagues and their ...”

“... work by which he is – invisibly – best known to modern popular culture outside Russia, via the Peter Shaffer play it inspired, Amadeus, rendered onto the big screen by Miloš Forman. In Mikhailovskoye, as well as parts of Eugene Onegin, Pushkin wrote the historical drama Boris Godunov, finished the long poem The Gypsies, wrote the prologue to his first ...”

“... and Glasgow also enthral him. He is baffled by those like G.M. Trevelyan and, more recently, Peter Hall, who have found in the Victorian urban patchwork only muddle. Yet muddle there was, the reader is reminded, as idea locks horns with idea and style jostles with style. Take the marginal matter of style. The industrial cities were aware they amounted to ...”

“... 13 January. One of Peter Cook’s jokes, several times quoted in his obituaries, is of two men chatting. ‘I’m writing a novel,’ says one, whereupon the other says: ‘Yes, neither am I.’ And of course it’s funny and has a point, except that Peter, I suspect, felt that this disposed of the matter entirely ...”

“... are inscribed with the name of one of her regular correspondents – Helen Hunt Jackson, Dr J.G. Holland or his wife, Mrs Holland – making one feel that for Dickinson the decision about whether or not to send a letter she’d written could be almost as problematic as the decision about whether or not to publish her ...”