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“... in Scotland.Presumably your mother had to go to work, with such young children to provide for.She took in lodgers. Indeed, that’s how she managed. But my father had had this Scottish thing about education, so there was no question of any of us leaving school or getting a job.Money was always very tight then?We had a rather wonderful well-off aunt in ...”

“... are prohibited, and a high standard of financial and moral behaviour is expected. Yet this ideal took a long time to emerge. In 1600, political offices were usually seen as the property of the monarch, bestowed as a reward for service. Many offices were unpaid, but most conferred social capital of various kinds and also carried the expectation of profit, to ...”

“... from England to escape was Shakespearean theatre. Although the British military authorities who took over the John Street theatre in New York during the hostilities must have wondered whether the productions of Richard III, King Lear, The Taming of the Shrew and Macbeth that they staged there between 1777 and 1783 were ...”

“... He affects​ the Metaphysics,’ Dryden wrote of John Donne, ‘not only in his satires, but in his Amorous Verses, where Nature alone should reign; and perplexes the Minds of the Fair Sex with nice Speculations of Philosophy, when he shou’d ingage their Hearts, and entertain them with the softnesses of Love ...”

“... the Society’s history in more than six hundred pages, ably translated from German by John Noël Dillon. Markus Friedrich’s volume could be described as relentless, but its barrage of information is a trustworthy basis from which to begin to understand one of the most remarkable products of Counter-Reformation energy. The Jesuits have always ...”

“... capital sniffing out the news. Writers like H. R. Knickerbocker, Malcolm Muggeridge, Eugene Lyons, John Gunther and Walter Duranty were our eyes and cars in the world. The milieux in which these men functioned in the Twenties and Thirties were turbulent and romantic. Moving constantly between Paris, Berlin and Moscow, they knew each other; they frequented the ...”

“... a sane, amusing, unintimidating introduction to the consequences of mathematical illiteracy, John Allen Paulos shows how a little arithmetic can cast light on the cohesiveness of cultures. He quotes an experiment in which the psychologist Stanley Milgrim gave each member of a randomly-selected group of people a document and a ‘target individual’ to ...”

“... itself was best understood as godly clockwork. The products and faith of this clockwork universe took the clockwatchers and their timepieces everywhere. In August 1773, after a 13-month voyage from Britain, the sloops Resolution and Adventure arrived on the north coast of Tahiti. For some on board, including their captain, James Cook, this was a return visit ...”

“... culture of the Scottish Enlightenment which Madison acquired at Princeton from the teaching of John Witherspoon. Professor Garry Wills has now followed Adair and extended his thesis in producing an interpretation of Madison in which the Scottish influence on him has a central place. Wills’s earlier book Inventing America perhaps overstated the case for ...”

“... the discussion of Donatello, in particular, is marred by the fact that one crucial work, the St John in Venice, is misdated by 15 years. Even John Walker, in his preface, is hard put to find anything very remarkable in the text. The best he can do is to claim that ‘Italian 15th-century art needs an apologist like ...”

“... the aura that surrounded the memory and continuing cult of Edward in England. From France, he took a series of visual models and paradigms. In 1247, in a ritual designed to evoke the ceremonial of a coronation, Henry paraded a relic of the Holy Blood through the streets to Westminster, just as a few years earlier Louis IX had paraded the relic of the True ...”

“... we hadn’t had such great names?’ Frank O’Hara wonders in Nat Tate, the hoax biography that took in much of New York’s art establishment a few weeks ago: ‘what if we had been called Gilbert Kline, Jonathan Pollock, Cyril O’Hara, Jennifer Krasner, Timothy Rivers, Philip Tate?’ The question is left hanging but the answer, in Tate’s case, is that ...”

“... individual identity’ in the technological modern world. The Profile may have enlivened what I took to be a rather anaemic response to the film since it was first shown in cinemas in this country. My impression is that cinéastes shrank from it as from some sort of solid up-market soap opera, and that in being seen as unduly popular, it has failed to ...”

“... eschatological excitement made him respond eagerly to Reuveni’s claims.† When the cardinal took Reuveni to see Pope Clement VII, the ‘prince’ produced a Hebrew genealogy tracing his ancestors back to the biblical King David (a translator must have been used for the presentation since Reuveni spoke only Hebrew and Arabic). Identity documents ...”

“... Fleming takes up the story: ‘The class-ridden British sneered at each other. The Europeans took a more egalitarian view: all Britons were equally awful. It wasn’t so much their clothes and their accents as their manners … [They] were known as “Yes and No Tourists”, from their refusal to engage in conversation.’ In 1851 Mont Blanc suffered ...”