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“... If the sovereign nation-state is truly nearing the end of its useful life, as political philosophers here in Western Europe now seem ready to persuade us, so that regional unities of one kind of another may replace it to the general good, the tendency looks far more problematical further east. Resounding nationalism, or rather nation-statism, the two being by no means necessarily the same thing, is what presently appears to reign from Lithuania to the Black Sea or further east again, and from Slovenia to Albania by way of a newly abrasive ‘Serbianism ...”

“... hallmark lies not in 1492 but in that period from 950 to 1350 which is the subject of Robert Bartlett’s remarkable book. Bartlett has written an absorbing account of how a common culture emerged throughout what now regards itself as Europe. His subject is the central Middle Ages, because it was then that Europe ...”

“... At around 9 p.m. on 9 December 1992 Nigel Bartlett was walking down a quiet suburban street near Wood Green in North London when a man began to follow him. The man – Bartlett said he looked ‘like the Michelin man’ – started walking backwards in front of him and asked him if he was the devil, and then if he was happy ...”

“... least – partly because it teaches that the common man can change the course of history. As W.B. Bartlett puts it, the battle ‘made legends of a class known simply as “the English yeoman”, to whom the triumph of Agincourt more than any others belongs’. The 600th anniversary of the battle, fought on 25 October 1415, was celebrated last year with ...”

“... also locked horns with Britain’s two most senior and powerful psychology professors, Frederick Bartlett of Cambridge and Cyril Burt of University College London. Bartlett, as chair of a symposium at which Eysenck and some young colleagues were to present papers, peremptorily announced that each speaker’s time would be ...”

“... history’: a detailed study of the ways in which tattered texts that had belonged to one writer, Charles Lamb, won the passionate attention of American collectors and taught them new lessons about the hunt for old books.Broadway in the 1840s was already a hive of urban entertainments, from Niblo’s Garden theatre to P.T. Barnum’s American Museum, which ...”

“... This organisation very soon started to show signs of the malaise it was set up to cure. One man, Charles Knight Murray, assumed great power over the Church estates, but forgot to tell the Commissioners that he was a director of the London, Chatham and Dover Railway and an eager speculator in railway shares. To pay for his prodigious share purchases, he ...”

“... officer’s career, though the evidence offered was far from conclusive, to the trial of Adelaide Bartlett, who ungratefully, and in a manner still unexplained, poisoned her husband, a benign and even cooperative cuckold, so that she might have freer play with her lover, an uninspiring Wesleyan minister. He represented a wealthy, foolish widow who got herself ...”

“... from them. London’s wealthy had been moving west since the 17th century and McWilliam fixes on Charles II’s Restoration in 1660 as the moment when the economy took off again after the uncertainties and destruction caused by the Civil Wars. The plague saw only a temporary retreat, and the population of London quadrupled between 1550 and 1700. It was ...”

“... and frequently paralysis of the writing arm or, as we would say, repetitive strain injury. Charles Lamb records in ‘The Superannuated Man’ the misery of his years in Mincing Lane as a writer for the EIC. He became haunted by a sense of incapacity for business: ‘I had perpetually a dread of some crisis, to which I should be found unequal. Besides ...”

“... Henry Horne says something offensive to a young lady named Rita when her brother Charles is by to protect her. Can you hear the two different tones in which she says their respective names, “Henry Horne! Charles!” I can hear it better than I can say it.’ On other occasions, Frost makes his point by ...”

“... is in no sense settled. During this decade alone he has been roughly treated by, among others, G. Bartlett Giamatti, in an address given while he was President of Yale, by John Updike in a very extended attack in the New Yorker, by Irving Howe’s unflattering lectures in The American Newness, and by the refusal even to list him among the indispensable ...”