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“... The Lake District farmers have little choice but to overstock their pastures. Last year the price they got for sheep was the same as it had been in 1983 and some of them are having to sell their stone dykes to make ends meet. How can they resist the subsidy of £30 per animal? Overgrazing has spoiled nearly half a million acres of moorland in Wales ...”

“... scheme in which the government bought the crop from farmers for about 50 per cent above the world price, in the belief that by cornering such a large supply, it could move the market. When prices remained stubbornly low, the government found itself unable to pay the farmers, and – thanks to the atmosphere of jeopardy engendered by the political crisis ...”

“... replaced bad by good kings – a useful legitimation of conquest or usurpation. According to Simon Price, the symbolic apotheosis to divinity of the Roman emperors from their funeral pyre, with Senatorial control of the deification process in judging the ‘candidate’s’ virtue, reconciled republican and imperial ideologies. The rituals described by the ...”

“... low temperatures at home. While the energy required to keep a body running remains unchanged, the price of doing so is higher than ever. Even before the instability caused by Putin’s war, gas markets were failing to meet post-lockdown energy demands. Reserves depleted during the cold winter of 2020-21 haven’t been replaced. The UK only imports a fraction ...”

“... with the pace of travel, but not the direction.Climate politics is a new front for Brexiters. Richard Tice, leader of the Reform (previously Brexit) Party, of which Farage is president, has repeatedly claimed that net zero is as divisive as EU membership. The party, which is running 120 candidates in the local elections, believes that the public mood is ...”

“... was founded on a crime (he deposed, imprisoned and some would say caused the death of his cousin Richard II, who had once been his playmate). Caught between self-command and the most crushing self-doubt, Walter knew how to rise to this part and bring it down in the same breath. The king is wan with care and insomnia – he is guilty. He is also ...”

“... Richard​ Holbrooke is the only American diplomat since the Vietnam War to have become a full-throttle celebrity, as likely to appear in the tabloids clutching a woman as putting forward a policy proposal in Foreign Affairs. In his thirst for publicity and enthusiasm for the pantomime of statesmanship, only Holbrooke’s nemesis, Henry Kissinger, compares ...”

“... not only Auden’s ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, but also a number of other putative letters (to Richard Crossman and William Coldstream, for instance), MacNeice’s ‘Eclogue from Iceland’, the famously camp prose-piece ‘Hetty to Nancy’, and the joint-authored ‘Last Will and Testament’. According to Auden, MacNeice wrote about eighty of the 240 ...”

“... Richard Evans hopes that this book will take the place of E.H. Carr’s What is History? and G.R. Elton’s The Practice of History as the ‘basic introduction’ to history as taught in the universities. Evans is a self-declared ‘Rankean’ empiricist, committed to Ranke’s view that facts and documents ‘speak for themselves ...”

“... In the Preface to his new book Richard Wollheim tells how he ‘evolved a way of looking at paintings which was massively time-consuming and deeply rewarding’. He looked at them for a very long time – longer than us – and then they told him what they were all about. I came to recognise that it often took the first hour or so in front of a painting for stray associations or motivated misperceptions to settle down, and it was only then, with the same amount of time or more to spend looking at it, that the picture could be relied upon to disclose itself as it was ...”

“... academics might seem an unlikely topic for him. He found out about their work after the economist Richard Thaler and the legal scholar Cass Sunstein suggested in a joint review of Moneyball that the story of Billy Beane, the general manager of the baseball team the Oakland Athletics, could be read as a case study in support of Kahneman and Tversky’s ...”

“... vengefulness, the compulsive penis envy, and the desire to be whipped, of Captain Ahab. Only Richard Henry Dana in Two Years Before the Mast and, in The Oregon Trail, Francis Parkman, whose homosexual proclivities deserve more attention here, come forward as relatively standard cases of the urge to ‘be a man’. Leave it to the genteel types ...”

“... The division of labour, whose language is money, helps us to prosperity and liberty but at the price of atomising our picture of the world. The labourer, Smith writes, is ‘not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment ...”

“... as the stuff of guidebooks and finds no room for its theorists, with the exception of Uvedale Price, who is brushed off as an ‘enthusiastic Herefordshire landowner’. Yet these ideas underlay the work of two brilliant generations of watercolourists, of whom Turner was only the most famous, at one of those historic moments when art, ideas and technique ...”

“... which would be hard to find in anyone’s view of any European literature. But consistency has a price. The descriptive labels, each one a totem of modernity, tend to obscure as much as they reveal. The Puritans, for example, qualify as moderns by virtue of iconoclasm and a preoccupation with signs; yet theirs was a distinctly unmodern modernity, a self ...”