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“... for its being a guide for stewards and landowners. (You don’t need a spatula to enjoy Elizabeth David.) There was an ash tree outside our house in Kentish Town: I know because I had to ask the council to lop away some of the upper growth as it came closer to the bedroom window. (The ancient tree in James’s story is uncomfortably close to the window of the ...”

“... I look in the index of books on either sensibility or sentiment, and if there is no reference to David Hartley I close the volume. G.J. Barker-Benfield passes the test – his index lists Hartley as well as Shaftesbury, Hume, Adam Smith and, of course, Locke, for even the non-philosophical usually know that a brief reference to Locke must be ...”

“... of a man facing a huge breathtaking vista of mountains, mist and sun, a version of Caspar David Friedrich’s Traveller above the Sea of Clouds. A closer look tells us that this man is engaged in painting the railing in front of him, and just now standing back to survey his handiwork. In several different countries, Cartier-Bresson will show two or ...”

“... into a campus celebrity. (‘Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s,’ according to Stanley Crouch, ‘one could see the signal bright red cover almost everywhere that young people were gathered.’) The book was Cruse’s response to the failures of the civil rights movement, and his sharp criticism of Black intellectuals, and their timid ...”

“... The connoisseur of deathbeds, of the fortitude of their occupants, of the composure of the atheist David Hume, the prison visitor who liked to watch executions, and appears to have lacked Johnson’s terror of futurity, was off somewhere on business when his wife stopped living. The journal deals with his five years as the widower formed by that crisis. His ...”

“... the world we have left behind. But the headlong momentum of the broken road, endured in a foetal crouch for so many miles, is swiftly absorbed when our modestly recompensed Asháninka hosts climb from their benches to greet and process the latest off-highway time travellers eager not only to witness but to participate in the old ways of the high jungle and ...”

“... Brigaders, Trotskyites, Communists, pacifists failed by their tribunals. The playwright David Hare declared recently that working-class conscripts now met ‘the officer class’ for the first time and rebelled; but plenty had met the people issuing orders, at least since Peterloo. Moreover, an Army largely unemployed except in training or retreat ...”

“... exercising, drilling or turning up on time. During a recent ambush, some of them refused to crouch in a ditch because it would have muddied their boots. The desertion rate is around 20 per cent and is rather higher among those who have been told they are being deployed to Helmand. They can be bribed to work with ‘sexy ...”

“... by, among others, Alfred Kazin, Marvin Mudrick, Frank Kermode, Leslie A. Fiedler, Stanley Crouch and Vivian Gornick (how she has been vindicated! Her 1976 Village Voice essay on Roth and company, ‘Why Do These Men Hate Women?,’ was a warning siren) – that fresh illuminations would be tough to unlock. It’s not as if literary criticism is pining ...”

“... secession war in 1993 (another $600,000 was intercepted before he could pay it into his account). David Mirtskhulava, the former minister of energy, had a mild heart attack when he was charged with pocketing $6 million on its way to pay Georgia’s bill for electricity imports. Georgia is not a sprawling continent, but a poor, steep country about the same ...”

“... while colluding with it sub rosa. Behind closed doors in Washington, France’s ambassador Jean-David Levitte – currently Sarkozy’s diplomatic adviser – gave the White House a green light for the war, provided it was on the basis of the first generic UN Resolution 1441, as Cheney wanted, without returning to the Security Council for the second ...”