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“... their negligence was calculated, their private life ostentatious.’ Drinking and copulation are major themes of Rochester’s private correspondence, as of his public image. His advice to Nell Gwyn (conveyed through Henry Savile) on how to handle the King was ‘with hand, body, head, heart and all the faculties you have, contribute to his pleasure all you ...”

“... in a certain order’. And he continues: The basic assumption of modern art – I speak of the major trends, those related to Matisse, Bonnard, Braque, Picasso, Soutine, Klee, Mondrian – is that the first concern of a work of art is to present a configuration of shape and colours and marks which in and of itself stimulates and satisfies, and that only ...”

“... it. From the really nice people he graduated to the ‘lurid and fashionable’, as Augustus John described the artistic set in Twenties Paris. It was the world of the Train Bleu, of Diaghilev, Cocteau, opium and neurosis; a brittle atmosphere vulnerable to clumsy intrusions. Wood had to flee in embarrassment when his uncle and aunt turned up on a ...”

“... Napoleonic Wars, a patriotic mythology fixated on the achievements of Nelson, Wellington and Sir John Moore at Corunna tends to filter out fear and uncertainty in favour of a seemingly inevitable procession of victories. As Jenny Uglow stresses in her gripping account of Britain during the Napoleonic era, contemporaries had no such feeling of security. There ...”

“... He was now a figure to be reckoned with: he’d been repackaged as a serious novelist and he was a major bestseller. Even so there are plenty of readers in China who think of him as a spy writer who prefers baggy plots, Lone Ranger clichés and gushing emotions to psychological acuity of the kind you find in John le ...”

“... his political manner contrasts pointedly with that of both his successors. About the second major theme of Westlake’s book – the extent to which the modern Labour Party, New Labour, is Kinnock’s creation – Roy Hattersley wrote last year that ‘the Blair Project is not a continuation of Neil Kinnock’s reforms. Kinnock wanted to establish a new ...”

“... to reconfigure our understanding of power. At Berkeley he ran a seminar from which two other major books emerged: Peter Brown’s The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (1988), which explored the theme of carnality and spirituality, and Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud ...”

“... her best-known books, and now this new one, The Long Parliament of Charles II, are centred on the major figures of the early modern era: Marvell, Shakespeare, Milton and, again, Marvell. Her lifelong struggle has been to achieve freedom of thought, freedom of expression and freedom of the press for 17th-century Englishmen. It is surprising how much success ...”

“... piece called Appalachian Spring in collaboration with Aaron Copland and Isamu Noguchi. In 1945, John Cage and Merce Cunningham would marry their exploratory sensibilities. All these artists were struggling, in the words of Lincoln Kirstein, who co-founded the New York City Ballet, ‘to impose a native meaning on a recalcitrant alien dance ...”

“... Little Constructions (2007), Burns’s second novel, in which the characters have names like John Doe and Jetty Doe and JesseJudges Doe and JanineJuliaJoshuatine Doe, has the same ferocious levity, but is even more intense. It’s an unsummarisable fantasia around sexual abuse and violence in the town of Tiptoe Floorboard, where ...”

“... direction, highlighting, for example, the lesser-known contemporary antagonists to whom major authors were responding. The discipline still contained a canon of thinkers whose originality, subtlety and complexity entitled them to special attention; but contextualism – as interpreted by its most anti-canonical, historicising adepts – moved the ...”

“... Especially striking is her portrait of Christian (‘Bébé’) Bérard as a jovial latter-day John the Baptist, his head neatly suspended at the edge of a round pool as though on a tray. There are also distinctive fashion photographs, like the one of a model in a bathing-suit superimposed on a pattern of sun-dappled water; or another of a tiny sailing ...”

“... informativeness test. I don’t at all share his optimism. Someone who finds it unsurprising that John understands that bachelors are bachelors might, I suppose, still wonder whether John understands that bachelors are unmarried men. So it appears that if, following Peacocke’s recipe, you substitute ‘unmarried ...”

“... a job which requires faith. ‘You have to believe as you go on that in fact there is some major organising principle that remains to be discovered. You have to believe that indeed it exists and that no matter how imperfect a foundation may be from one year to the next, or what setbacks occur, how many seemingly intractable methodological problems ...”

“... The trial of Dr John Bodkin Adams at the Old Bailey in 1957 was one of the causes célèbres of the post-war years. Apart from sex, it had everything. Adams was a fashionable Eastbourne doctor. Portly. With a chauffeur-driven Rolls. Charged with murdering one of his rich old women patients, for a chest of silver. There were strong hints she was not his only victim ...”