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“... Caroline Lamb. Lady Cowper was not being complimentary. She later described Caroline as being ‘more termagant than ever’. Such disparagement of the woman, who in 1812 had a notorious affair with Byron and was married to a future prime minister, was not confined to the Lamb family. Metternich’s mistress, Princess Lieven, referred to ‘that madwoman ...”

“... he added, was ‘less a subject for censure than regret’. Shelley’s friend and biographer, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, being himself a barrister, could not go quite so far, but his verdict was almost as sweeping: the most profound ignorance is ... the grand, unenviable distinction of the English lawyer – an animal too often drawn from the dregs of ...”

“... Thomas Mann wrote this engaging novella in a few weeks in 1943. (The new translation by Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann, which is brisk and direct, is a welcome replacement of the fussier and less accurate English version done by Helen Lowe-Porter for the original publication.) The novella was written after Mann helped pitch a film on the Ten Commandments to MGM ...”

“... daily thinking, through these and related examples, suggests convincingly that we owe others far more than we typically think we do. This, then, is a book on a topic of great importance, written with much moral passion by a skilful and ingenious philosopher. And yet its conclusion suggests that something is amiss. For Unger argues that a relatively affluent ...”

“... everyone who died in Britain between 1809 and 1914 leaving personal assets of £100,000 or more – which is equivalent to between £8 and £10 million today. The first volume, covering the years 1809-39, lists 881 people – about one in ten thousand of those who died. After their scarcity the most immediately striking thing about these rich people is ...”

“... during seven and a half years of court patronage. In England a rare talent was diverted; what is more to the point, a portrait painter with an unequalled delicacy of touch ceased to exercise his uncanny skills of visual transcription. Compare Cornelis van der Geest in the National Gallery, painted around 1620 when he was just out of his teens, with the ...”

“... indecent.’ Johnson’s Dictionary should be seen (and perhaps this reprint will make the view more possible) as part of various 18th-century endeavours to arrange and make accessible earlier accumulated erudition and experience. Such endeavours include Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia (1728), a work which Johnson drew on for the Dictionary, the French ...”

“... novel, Shuttlecock, narratives of two generations are again developed in tandem – but with a more exhibitionistic cleverness; and again the failure, or, at best, distortion, of communication between fathers and children is witness to the compromise of ideals – often an ideal of nature – which should have transmitted themselves in a sense of the ...”

“... The sun never shone more brightly and a boy’s dreams never seemed in closer reach, nor the girl next door prettier, nor his friends readier for bold adventure on a Saturday free of school than all did in the ‘white town drowsing’ on the Missouri shore of the mighty Mississippi River where Mark Twain in the 1840s drank deeply of the sweetness of life, and never forgot it ...”

“... In September​ , the Irish government held a state funeral for the exhumed remains of Thomas Kent, a rebel and a patriot who was executed in 1916 and buried in the yard of what is now Cork Prison, at the rear of Collins Barracks, once the Victoria Barracks. His coffin was first removed to the garrison church, where thousands of people – including Dr John Buckley, the bishop of Cork and Ross – filed past to pay their respects ...”

“... laser pointers, broken or otherwise. The visitors started to arrive, and by the end of the year more than ten thousand bids had been placed on AuctionWeb. In February 1996, the site was receiving so much traffic that Omidyar’s internet service provider started charging him a commercial rate of $250 a month (up from $30 for a home user). With the ISP ...”

“... see that he wins her love and is a faithful husband to it; he courts her as fervently as, and much more persistently than, he does any other woman – he amuses her, shocks her, tells her the truth, expresses contempt for the boring and brutish flatterers in her second-rate world who would deceive her for their private purposes, and with good spirits survives ...”

“... his better judgment to downgrade his hero in the title and to include the Shelleys, who are more famous. This rich, glorious book is, however, a biography of William Godwin – no more, no less. St Clair himself is described on the dust-jacket as a ‘senior Treasury official’, a horrifying disclosure which emerges ...”

“... in effect Yeltsin’s serf. When he was cast out by the man whom he had served day and night for more than ten years, Korzhakov ‘suddenly realised’, he now writes, that he had never loved Yeltsin as a man. At first I simply worked with him. He stood out from the other nomenklatura officials and this difference delighted me. Then during his period of ...”

“... work on the scale of The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is bound also to be seen as much more than a reference tool: as, by turns, a statement of national identity, an occasion for communal pride, a showcase for contemporary historical scholarship, a piece of swagger publishing, and, less directly, a stay against oblivion, a giant memorial slab ...”