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“... Until a comparatively short time ago most books purporting to deal with Greek mythology were content only to relate the myths, fighting shy of any attempt to explain that part of their significance which is not apparent on the surface. The proliferation of theories of myth which started about 1830 and finished, roughly speaking, at the beginning of the First World War was followed by a positivist reaction ...”

“... In 1909 there appeared a small book by Montgomery Carmichael modestly entitled Francia’s Masterpiece and dedicated to reconstructing the content, purpose and original setting of a single Renaissance altarpiece. It provided what is still the best account of the treatment of the Immaculate Conception in old Italian art. Carmichael deplored the limited outlook of the scholars of his day who were uninterested in the religious nature of the art they catalogued, and expressed his outrage at their complicity in the removal of ‘church pictures’ from ‘living use over altars and shrines to the chill fastnesses of meaningless museums and art galleries’ on the pretext of danger from the candles lit before them ...”

“... When Shakespeare et la fête appeared in 1988, it was building upon approaches already established in the studies of C.L. Barber, E.K. Chambers and Enid Welsford which related Shakespeare’s plays to Elizabethan calendrical customs. What distinguished Laroque’s book, however, was the breadth of its documentation and discussion, which spanned the entire corpus of Shakespeare’s writings, and its enviable command of recent explorations of popular culture, many of them the work of French folklorists and anthropologists ...”

“... In France, some years ago, a film director was making a film about the Napoleonic Wars. He enlisted more than a hundred extras to represent the French and other armies; the rate of pay for these extras was precisely the same whether they were playing officers or merely soldiers. Filming, which lasted several weeks, took place in open country, a long way from any town or village, so an open-air canteen was set up to provide for this fairly large number of ‘troops ...”

“... Of all​ the many disappointments of 1977, the ITV series Man from Atlantis has to be one of the greatest. The title suggested a programme that would have something to do with the lost underwater kingdom described in great detail by Plato in the Timaeus and Critias. But the reality was Patrick Duffy with webbed hands and fluorescent green contact lenses, painfully painted on ...”

“... been silently moved to the middle of the book, along with some further textual rearrangement, in Janet Lloyd’s translation.) Above all, he challenges the view, widely held in antiquity, and substantiated by Thucydides, that because of his policy of pay (misthos) for citizens in the law courts and elsewhere, combined with his major and long-lasting ...”

“... When she regretfully consigned the old world to the dustbin of history in North and South, Mrs Gaskell had no illusions about the nastiness of the new, but still saw it as conferring an unprecedented independence on the working man. Dickens put the emphasis on the dehumanised pursuit and efficient accumulation of material wealth, as an end in itself: the replacement of Squire Allworthy by Mr Bounderby ...”

“... knew what they would think about it before they got there. In The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcolm talks about betrayal as one of the besetting problems of journalism: betrayal by the journalist of his ‘source’, because the ‘source’ always assumes, or at least hopes, that his testimony will be treated as a unique document when it will at ...”

“... help than might be expected from so distinguished a student of Liberalism, for he still regards Lloyd George’s offer of a Lib-Lab coalition in 1914 as a ‘trap’, and he sees Henderson as ‘imperishably identified with the proud independence of the Labour movement’ when he leaves Lloyd George’s coalition in ...”

“... taken up in hope,’ Crawford says, ‘were always turned against him.’ In 1898 he married Janet Forbes. Her letters, blessedly direct after Ashbee’s, show what the arts-and-crafts life was like for someone who could not escape on a lecture tour when things became dull at home. He kept a distance between himself and emotion which is almost ...”

“... mention Colette, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Djuna Barnes, Romaine Brooks, Virginia Woolf, Janet Flanner, Vita Sackville-West, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Ivy Compton-Burnett, the gallery owner Betty Parsons – even the kooky, spooky, more-than-a-little-ropey Patricia Highsmith, a gothic late-life pal, intriguingly, of Murphy’s. It’s true that ...”

“... of real heroes like Jean Jaurès and Karl Liebknecht make the figures of Asquith and Churchill and Lloyd George seem like pygmies. This is precisely the kind of romanticism Schmitt was writing about; indeed the Basel conference may have been one of the specific instances he had in mind. To celebrate an event that failed entirely to achieve its ...”

“... the Swiss mountains as being cholera-free, but Stevenson fancied southern England. Fanny’s son, Lloyd Osbourne, was at school in Bournemouth. ‘It was lovely autumn weather when R.L.S. and my mother arrived,’ he wrote many years later. ‘They were in the highest spirits; everything pleased them; and they seemed not to have a care in the world.’ The ...”