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“... From one point of view, Thomas Crow’s remarkable pair of books, Painters and Public Life in 18th-Century Paris (1985) and Emulation: Making Artists for Revolutionary France (1995), can be described as a history of the decline and fall, and amazing final reprieve, of history-painting in France. Long cherished by the Academy of Painting and Sculpture as the highest and ‘noblest’ genre and the summit of a painter’s ambition, by the middle of the 18th century the theme of critics and philosophers was that, in the France of Louis XV, history-painting was simply impossible ...”

“... Well: the poems were lying about, & I did not quite know what to do with them,’ Thomas Hardy wrote to Edmund Gosse shortly after the publication of his first collection, Wessex Poems (1898). ‘It is difficult,’ he went on, ‘to let people who think I have made a fresh start know that to indulge in rhymes was my original weakness, & the prose only an afterthought ...”

“... seemed no less remote to us than the ghastly, overdressed 1950s family who lived in our rather more ancient French textbook, dining on chocolate ‘tartines’ served by a maid in a silly hat. Marcus always seemed a little forlorn, but I put that down to the stiffness of his tunic, his authentic but uncool haircut (hovering between the Beatles and pudding ...”

“... But observers (and perhaps other chimps) could be forgiven for thinking it was a reference to Thomas Henry Huxley, the best-known ‘man of science’ in Victorian England, a comparative anatomist who also became the leading, and most aggressive, public spokesman for evolutionary ideas, to the point where he was known as ‘Darwin’s bulldog’. After ...”

“... while another Hals painting, The Singing Boys (c.1623-27), adorns the companion volume, Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture. The Singing Boys is no doubt meant to recall Middleton’s early work for the Children of Paul’s, one of those boy companies whose performances were punctuated by songs and entr’acte music; but the fleshly ...”

“... especially blood. If, as Orwell says, Billy Bunter is a first-class comic character, then how much more so is William. His creator, a clergyman’s daughter and one-time Classics mistress, polio-stricken, never grew to despise him, though she may have had dying regrets that none of her 39 adult novels achieved anything like the fame of her 38 William ...”

“... poorest he that is in England has a life to live as the greatest he.’ This assertion by Colonel Thomas Rainborowe in November 1647 seems almost a cliché, as much part of the democratic history of England as the Magna Carta or the Tolpuddle Martyrs or Paine’s Rights of Man. Yet for two and a half centuries after Rainborowe said his piece, no one knew ...”

“... a three-volume anthology, Women Writing Latin: From Roman Antiquity to Early Modern Europe. Two more women, an American medievalist, Rita Copeland, and a Dutch classicist, Ineke Sluiter, have now edited the monumental Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric: Language Arts and Literary Theory, AD 300-1475, but it is populated exclusively by men even if two women write ...”

“... the sermon itself are, however, only mentioned in chronicle accounts, albeit contemporary ones. A more reliable source records a rebel being indicted for freeing Balle not from the archbishop’s prison at Maidstone but from the bishop of London’s prison at Bishop’s Stortford. Since this was on 11 June, and the rebels were on Blackheath on the afternoon ...”

“... Sand Water muscling to shore at twilight, Muscling over her ribs, the water so warm For September. Thomas Paine said, We just couldn’t stay boys (regarding the colonists) Or something to that effect. Ladybugs gather, covering a pear, Gulls screech about the deserted lighthouse. How agreeable to discover Someone loves you, or even later, That you’ve become a fixture In someone’s stable of influences ...”

“... without fanfare. As yet, few have picked up on an analysis by the New York University economist Thomas Philippon of the history of the unit cost of financial intermediation. The unit cost is a measure of the efficiency of the financial system, and Philippon tracks its level in the United States since 1884, the time of pens and paper ledgers, when a ...”

“... or, if seen as half-horse, hooves, not feet, gelatinous from jigging on that heat, and they dance more featly, fleeter, faster because their dancefloor’s on the site of a disaster. Does their acrobatic goat/horse/man gavotte come from the ground they jig on being hot? All I’m suggesting is we might enquire if the dancing is dependent on the ...”

“... His notice in the Victorian DNB was a scant 700 words; in the new DNB it has ballooned to more than 8000. Now he has been canonised by the publication of an Oxford edition of his complete works, the second complete works in a century, more than have been accorded either Hobbes or Locke. The story of Winstanley’s ...”

“... At one point in Thomas Peacock’s satire Melincourt, the heroine Anthelia offers a spirited sketch of the character traits which she looks for in a prospective husband. ‘I would require him to be free in all his thoughts, true in all his words, generous in all his actions – ardent in friendship, enthusiastic in love, disinterested in both … the champion of the feeble, the firm opponent of the powerful oppressor – not to be enervated by luxury, nor corrupted by avarice, nor intimidated by tyranny, nor enthralled by superstition – more desirous to distribute wealth than to possess it, to disseminate liberty than to appropriate power, to cheer the heart of sorrow than to dazzle the eyes of folly ...”

“... without falling prey to a barbarous irrationalism? It is a problem that haunts the pages of Thomas Mann – another refugee from Hitler – for whose Doctor Faustus Adorno acted as musicological adviser. In fact, Modernism in general is shot through with a desire for some solid truth while at the same time mourning its elusiveness. Modernist culture of ...”