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“... Elizabeth Prettejohn’s​ book opens with a discussion of The Last of England by Ford Madox Brown, made in 1852-55 and now in Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. The painting shows a couple leaving England for Australia on a crowded boat. It is insistent in its sharp focus, and brilliant, even strident, in its modern palette: the purple and green of cabbages hanging from the ship’s railing, the bright rose of a windswept silk bonnet ribbon cutting across the centre of the picture, and the mauve fingers of an otherwise concealed infant ...”

“... letters Kenner and Davenport sent each other over the course of 44 years, copiously annotated by Edward Burns and cross-referenced at the end of each year, begins, politely and a bit tentatively, in March 1958: ‘Dear Guy, I hope subsequent activities haven’t yet sufficed to obliterate our Boston dinner last fall from your memory.’ The two had crossed ...”

“... street.’ He picks up a lump of chert that ‘resembled a white eyeball wrapped in layers of brown linen’ and the geologist tells him that chert is the young Palestinians’ favourite throwing stone: ‘During the first intifada the young ones who took on the Israeli military with chert became known as the “children of the ...”

“... he offered the Expulsion of the Traders from the Temple, justly observing to the new director, Sir Edward Poynter, that ‘it is very much above the average of this most eccentric master’s works and has the advantage of being in splendid condition.’ It is striking that ‘eccentric’ was the adjective employed by both detractor and defender.Visitors to ...”

“... pronouncement. ‘I only do topics.’ File under: Epic, Gay (and Lesbian). When Sally meets Edward in Patrick Gale’s The Facts of Life, World War Two has just ended. Edward is German, Jewish, tubercular, a composer; Sally is his doctor in the East Anglian hospital where he has ended up after ten years as a refugee ...”

“... Fitzgerald shared with his hero Gatsby an untimely death and barely attended funeral. David Brown’s thorough biography, Paradise Lost, emphasises that Fitzgerald lived with the constant tension between the desire to be a ‘whole man’ and the recognition of its impossibility. His life was full of drama and destruction: reckless spending, high ...”

“... proved an unignorable source for current work, in the way that Heidegger and Wittgenstein have. Edward Skidelsky sees a recent positive shift in the winds of his reputation, but he is suspicious of the reasons for it. The very idealism and liberalism that make Cassirer seem to so many such an anachronism also render him newly appealing as the apostle of a ...”

“... Shardlake has a gimlet eye and a sharp mind. His character owes something to Chesterton’s Father Brown, except that where Brown draws on insights into human nature deriving from years in the confessional, Shardlake’s speciality is the sifting and weighing of evidence.Like all the best detectives, Shardlake is also an ...”

“... Illinois (Cincinnati, 1915). And he may be the only 20th-century reader of The Biography of Elder Brown Warren Stone written by himself, with Additions and Reflections by Elder John Rogers (Cincinnati, 1847). He describes the way you could make out the shape of his uncle’s toes through the leather of his shoes. He evokes the prosperous farming community of ...”

“... get white middle-class males to behave better to the people they enjoy shoving around: black and brown people, women, poor people, recent immigrants, homosexuals. It hoped to encourage these groups to take pride in themselves, rather than accepting the derogatory descriptions which the white males had invented. By now, however, it has turned into an attempt ...”

“... call-up? Was he a left-over Pre-Raphaelite – a post Pre-Raphaelite? The grandson of Ford Madox Brown, he had spent his childhood trying to fathom the Rossettis. He was named after his maternal grandfather, and Brown had been the subject of his first grown-up publication, a homage-ful biography. His imagination, however ...”

“... a not-yet-in-date subject of the once in a while and future king whom Henry James will christen Edward the Caresser. And at the centre of the novel is Professor Horace Nettleship, banked and glowering, a man whose geological hammer has chipped away his deity, and who is deep-seatedly obsessed with the monstrous parachronism of Bishop Ussher, too late a date ...”

“... and a discreetly hidden door leads straight into a speakeasy, with dancing girls, ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’ rather than Gounod (some like it hot), and various coffees served under the names of various whiskeys. Or rather the reverse: any whiskey you want as long as you call it coffee. The place is raided, and in this version of the narrative the historical ...”

“... in 1858 may appear not only presumptuous but also inappropriate to a commemoration of Radcliffe-Brown, whose lifelong concern was with structure and function rather than with evolution, and whose vision of ‘a natural science of society’ was, it has often been said, more taxonomic than analytical.* But the appearance is, I think, superficial, for two ...”

“... in what it says but in when it was said. 1968 was the year in which it seemed necessary to warn Edward Heath against wandering too eagerly in the direction of Selsdon Park. Here is Blake on tariff reform: It has seldom paid for the Conservative Party to come forward as the party of change. That is not why people vote for it. The Conservatives can accept ...”