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“... More than three centuries ago. Sir Thomas Browne noted ‘the humour of many heads to extol the days of their forefathers, and declaim against the wickedness of times present’. He added that these nostalgic declaimers seem always to have been present, and indeed one can find notable examples of them from virtually all periods of human history ...”

“... victory and fully aware of the potency of the Falklands factor, Tory politicians like Lord Hugh Thomas, the distinguished historian of Spain and Cuba, see the task of historians as the creation of a usable past which will confirm the version of history peddled in the popular press, furnish yet another justification of their claim to authority and boost the ...”

“... junior thinkers and makers, though often we imagine we are nicer. But they are so much older and more savvy that in all likelihood they’ve used up their own planet’s resources and are looking around the universe for a handy new planet to inhabit. Ours, we think, would be just dandy for the kinds of alien we imagine. So answer them and chances are ...”

“... architectural exhibitions is not a substitute for seeing real buildings, and the larger and more colourful pieces in Andrea Palladio: His Life and Legacy (at the Royal Academy until 13 April) are not central to an understanding of his work. There are portraits, including a fine El Greco that may or may not be of the architect; there is Bassano’s Tower ...”

“... nightmare: Englishness lost, identity cancelled, fatal infection,’ David Seabrook writes of Thomas De Quincey. Of himself, the dole-queue De Quincey, making a high-velocity, long-term progress through the Isle of Thanet. More speed, less haste: Seabrook is a master of the throwaway put-down, a speculator in tachist ...”

“... is reflections on the reflections: a summary of an argument on reason and the emotions, defended more fully in Love’s Knowledge; some pages on Wright’s Native Son and a paragraph on Forster’s Maurice, as successors to Hard Times; and an informal canvass of the opinions of American judges, whom Nussbaum (still in classroom mode) grades on the literary ...”

“... some by old and close friends who knew him very much better than I did. My excuse for adding one more piece is that I would like to explain something of what he meant to younger historians who came within his orbit. Perhaps I shall end up speaking only for myself, but at any rate I can speak from experience as one of his pupils. The greatest of Alan ...”

“... and sometimes still is, miraculously cured, or a grotto where mothers can suck stalactites to get more milk, or a school where children once staged a rebellion of mass hysteria, having been possessed by the devil, screaming and dancing wildly for months on end, and no one dared stop them. Here is a history of people of whom no one has ever heard, and whom ...”

“... above all needs to explain to himself. One might be able to write oneself into a new way of life, more amusing than the old: in this sense (which is Anita Brookner’s sense) writing is a penance for not being lucky in love but also a way of being livelier than life. Words also preserve memory ‘which would have vanished utterly had he not enclosed it in a ...”

“... is a tricky subject to deal with. To argue that the Knight is not presented ironically we may need more evidence than the mere juxtaposition of two uses of a single word. Such evidence, however, is there in abundance, though Jones chooses to ignore it. The Knight is the first of the pilgrims to be described; he is the first to be offered the ‘cut’ by the ...”

“... but her father’s reputation, was not happy about the restriction: ‘I wish the World would take more care of itself and less of its neighbours. I should have been very safe, I trust, without such flights, & disturbances, & breaches.’ In Delphine, her long, sometimes exasperating and now curiously timely novel, de Staël, who had escaped Paris during the ...”

“... other remarkable versions of essentially the same tale: Kate Grenville’s The Secret River,2 Thomas Keneally’s The Commonwealth of Thieves3 and Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria.4 The mystery of the stolen continent. Naturally, Australian readers know in advance who did it – and in a sense are still doing it. Newcomers took the country from the previous ...”

“... 19th-century American history. From the mid-1830s to the outbreak of war in 1861, Freeman counts more than seventy violent incidents – duels, fistfights, stabbings – in the halls of Congress and the surrounding streets. Anticipating violence, she writes, congressmen regularly ‘strapped on knives and guns’ before heading to work. Many historians have ...”

“... in the end. He could hamper, but not stop them. Ever since the launch of the Kipling rocket more than forty years earlier he had been far too famous for his letters to have been thrown away. At 24 he had not been six months in London before the Times had devoted a leader to his work. In that year, 1890, Henry James had termed him ‘the star of the ...”

“... fugitive lives. Some died of poverty or went to sea; some were transported to America or, more commonly, Australia. Others had moved to different parts of Britain. The custom of giving Africans garish or geo-specific names like Mungo, Pompey or Black London gradually died out and hundreds remain undetected in parish registers. In any case, after the ...”